Al Gore poses for a portrait while promoting his new film, An Inconvenient Sequel, in Toronto on Friday, July 21, 2017. (Photograph by Mikaela MacKenzie)

It may not feel like so long ago, but 2006 was a different time. Facebook and Twitter, which today fuel so much of our conversations, were still budding concerns. A blustering man named Donald Trump was a popular reality-TV host. And climate change was being discussed really at the edges, and hardly by the masses.

It was at this point, 11 years ago, that An Inconvenient Truth was released, and its dramatic talk of rising sea-levels made, well, waves. The movie, capturing and catalyzing the conversations being had about climate change at the time, made it the eleventh-highest grossing documentary in U.S. history, and it won an Academy Award for best documentary. Its star, the recount-rejected almost-President turned climate crusader Al Gore, earned a Nobel Prize and a reputation as a leader of the climate movement.

But Trump—these days, the president of the United States—has stated that he is not a believer in climate change. He’s surrounded himself with advisors who are evangelicals on that point, and America has pulled out of the international Paris Agreement. And the Trump White House is not alone in its skepticism. In the decade since An Inconvenient Truth premiered, general acceptance of the science behind climate change has been met by voices that continue to call it into question. The issue, seemingly settled by the data, is rhetorically stuck in a deadlock. Compounding the challenge to prompt immediate action is an apathy that has come with time: according to a recent Yale survey, while more than 70 per cent of Americans believe global warming is happening, and nearly 60 per cent are worried about climate change, only 43 per cent think it will “harm me, personally.”

Time for an update, then. An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, which comes out Aug. 4,is a call to arms for those invested in the climate-change fight, a personal polemic from Gore that’s less an education and more of an intervention.

In an interview with Maclean’s, the former U.S. vice president and the movie’s Canadian executive producer, Jeff Skoll, spoke about the challenges in communicating the threat of climate change, what happens when potential solutions fail, and what went wrong for the Democratic Party in the 2016 election. This interview has been condensed and edited.

One of the striking differences between An Inconvenient Truth and An Inconvenient Sequel was how personal it felt—for instance, it begins by listing off the criticisms against Mr. Gore. Why was that the case?

Al Gore: I think it mainly has to do with the point of view of the directors, Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk, who are masters of cinema verité technique, and they followed me around with cameras for two years. There were a lot of times when I saw the first rough cut where I was astonished that they had captured things on film that I had forgotten were there. When you’re going through an emotional experience and you’re focussed completely on what’s happening, you can’t even spare any attention that the camera’s there.

The difference between the two films comes down to their different approach, and also that some things have changed in the last decade. The extreme weather events related to climate are more frequent and much worse, and the solutions are here now—we had an opportunity to tell a new story. And one of the reasons that Jeff was so adamant in convincing me in going forward with a new movie was that we have a new story to present to the world.

Jeff Skoll: Eleven years ago, no one was really talking about climate change, and Al brought that subject to the table. We shot that movie in five months; nobody really know what they had, and it came out and caught on in the world like gangbusters. Davis Guggenheim, the director of the first film, did a great job, and he rightly said, “I’ve done my best, it needs another point of view.” We had the luxury this time of two sensational filmmakers who took those two years and travelled with Al around the world that created this wonderful story.

You spoke in the film about a personal crisis of faith, a feeling of despair that overtook you at one point in your fight. What happened, and how did you move past it?

AG: Well, anyone who deals with the climate crisis has an internal dialogue between hope and despair, because the challenge is so huge and the danger is so great and the stakes are so high. But I have always resolved that in favour of hope, and actually I’m more hopeful now than I was a decade ago when the solutions were visible on the horizon, but you had to seek reassurance that the technology experts that they’re coming, they’ll be here. But now they’re here, and in many parts of the world, in North America, the electricity from solar and wind is much cheaper than electricity from fossil fuels, and now the batteries are coming down in price, which lets you use solar electricity at night and wind electricity in the day, and that’s going to be a complete game-changer, worldwide.

So that hope I feel is not based on an act of will, it’s based on the evidence I see, not least the results in the Paris conference 18 months ago, which saw every nation in the world come together in a really historic breakthrough—net-zero global warming pollution by mid-century or soon thereafter as possible. And now many countries, even in the wake of President Trump’s speech last month, are doubling down on their commitments, and in my country, many of our governors and mayors and business leaders have stepped up to fill the gap and say we’re going to meet the requirements of the Paris agreement regardless of what President Trump does.

What was your personal moment of despair?

AG: It was when I saw the evidence that the large carbon polluters were using the playbook of the tobacco companies from years ago and spending enormous sums of money to pull the wool over people’s eyes to put out false evidence to create false doubts. But now more and more people are seeing through that, and there’s a new participants in the discussion, and that’s Mother Nature—turns out she’s more persuasive than any of the scientists are. Just look at the fires in British Columbia today. More than 40 large fires raging in the United States, today. Every night on the television news is like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation and more and more people are connecting the dots and realizing that we really have to face up to this challenge—not only for our kids and grandkids but for ourselves too, it’s happening right now.

As people do connect the dots, more people know about climate change—but there are fewer minds to change. People are hardening in their stances. An Inconvenient Sequel feels like it’s talking to the people who already believe—you’re giving presentations to people who are looking to give the same presentation to others. Is that dangerous, the risk of speaking only to the converted?

JS: One of the things we wanted to get across in this movie is that the solutions are there. The breakthrough in solar and in batteries and in other forms of renewables has happened.

AG: One of the things that is documented in the film is that people way outside any echo-chamber are now waking up to the new realities. For example there’s a moving scene in the movie that takes place in a conservative Republican city of Georgetown, Texas, with a conservative Republican Trump-supporting mayor who is also a CPA and ran the numbers and decided with his city council to shift over to 100 per cent renewable energy in the heart of oil country. And they’ve accomplished that now. And the electricity bills are going down and more jobs are being created. And that’s a new realization that’s spreading across North America, all across the world. India is closing coal-burning plants and vastly expanding solar. This is the kind of dramatic change and turn to the right direction that we need.

I want to talk about some of those solutions; one that was advocated in An Inconvenient Truth was carbon capture and sequestration. But that’s troubled now; for instance, the Kemper plant in Mississippi has moved away from CCS and is now burning natural gas. Saskatchewan’s Boundary Dam is experiencing cost overruns. You can put a lot of hope in some solutions, but what if these solutions start to fail? What if they don’t take?

JS: Obviously being entrepreneurial means taking risks, putting bets on lots of different things. Some of the things we put our bets on years ago were solar and wind; ten years ago, it cost $4 a watt to get solar installed, today it costs 38 cents a watt. It’s going down to pennies in the next years. Burning coal and trying to capture its off gasses, y’know, probably wasn’t the best idea, but we’re trying. In the meantime, I think the biggest breakthrough that’s upon us is the new generation of batteries which are super inexpensive, super powerful; we can have a global grid with batteries, solar and wind within a decade if we put our minds to it. The only thing that can slow us down are political obstacles, the economics are there. We’re still making bets on technologies and we always will, but the ones that are advanced now have not only have proven their track record but they’re about to demonstrate that even more so.

AG: And where carbon capture and sequestration is concerned, it’s still worth doing research to see if they can come up with a new approach. They’re using now a particular approach that works, but it’s just way too expensive and none of the utilities want to take a third of the electricity they’re now selling and divert it to run a carbon capture process. But if they come up with some breakthrough it may yet still play a role. But Jeff’s approach is I think exactly the right one—you’ve got to try a lot of different solutions and see which ones work.

Critics have called An Inconvenient Truth alarmist. And it is, at least, surely alarming. Between this film, America’s presidency and a New York Magazine story that provides doomsday scenarios, should fear be used as a motivator to reduce carbon emissions?

AG: Well, I think it always has to be leavened by hope. And the hope is real. And this movie leaves audiences extremely hopeful. It gives them an appreciation for how incredibly serious the challenge is, how dangerous the risks are, but it leaves them hopeful, and it should, because we’re seeing a turning now.

There have been endless debates how best to communicate concerning the climate crisis. My own answer to that question is that I’m not sophisticated enough to know all the behavioural psychology and neuroscience findings. I just concentrate on trying to tell the truth and trying to present the facts about the dangers and about the solutions and the activism.

Is there anything hopeful you can find about a U.S. administration that has pulled America out of the Paris Accord, has appointed climate-change deniers to environmental advisory roles, and will be in power for at least four crucial years when it comes to making a dent in carbon emissions?

AG: I’ve been looking for it, and I’m not going to hold my breath on Donald Trump changing his view. I tried very hard in conversations with him beginning in Trump Tower after the election and continuing in the first months of his presidency. I don’t think he’s going to change his mind, myself—I’d love to be proven wrong. But he’s surrounded himself with a rogues’ galleries of climate deniers and that’s unfortunate. But our governors and mayors and business leaders are working around him and we’re going to solve it regardless of what he tweets.

JS: I just happened to be amongst a group of the world’s top clean tech entrepreneurs and investors the day Trump announced the pullout from Prais—these are folks like Bill Gates and Elon Musk—and to a tee, every one of us was doubling down on our determination to make sure that our clean tech work advanced and we proved, one way or another, that the jobs that were being created out of clean tech, it’s the tip of the iceberg. So when you get people of that heft all determined to prove we can do this even without the federal government, we’re gonna do it.

You endorsed Hillary Clinton in the last election. And she has become a pariah for many Democrats, having lost to a candidate like Donald Trump. What do you think went wrong for Democrats in 2016?

AG: Well, she’s a smart strong experienced person, and I think she ran for office at a time where the well-known eight-year pendulum was swinging back against her. You see the same phenomenon in Canada—when one party is in power for two terms or eight years, there’s a tremendous headwind confronting any candidate of that same party that wants to continue it. And also the global populist authoritarian wave that we’ve seen in Poland and Hungary and the Philippines and certainly Russia has been a phenomenon driven by concerns that the pattern of globalization is making a lot of people feel as if they’re being left behind. And Donald Trump has skilfully exploited that anger and has positioned himself as a candidate of change, and of course ever since he’s come into office he’s gone back to the old plutocratic polluter policies that helped to create all these problems, but that’s another matter. But Secretary Clinton is a strong person, and she’s going to be fine.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/washington/al-gore-on-the-climate-change-fights-new-challenges/feed/28Tatiana Maslany on saying goodbye to Orphan Blackhttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/television/tatiana-maslany-on-saying-goodbye-to-orphan-black/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/television/tatiana-maslany-on-saying-goodbye-to-orphan-black/#respondSat, 10 Jun 2017 20:07:46 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=1028341The Canadian star of Orphan Black discusses feminism, Canadian TV, improv, and why the last episode isn't the most important

Given that she’s made her name acting as a slew of clones, the master class in character work accomplished weekly by Canadian actress Tatiana Maslany on Space/BBC America’s Orphan Black is, ironically enough, profoundly unique. But it all comes to an end this summer, after a five-season run that has been generally lauded by critics and that won Maslany a hard-earned Emmy award in 2016.

The final season of the dark, complex sci-fi series—which begins on June 10 and continues every Saturday on Space and BBC America until the final episode on Aug. 12—will be one final spin for Maslany’s deep roster of clone characters as they continue to unspool the Neolution conspiracy. In an interview with Maclean’s, the Regina-born actress talks about what it’s like to say goodbye to a show (and, since she plays so many characters, saying goodbye so many times), the value and trickiness of on-screen representation, her controversial portrayal of a trans clone, and coming to terms with the idea that she deserves her Emmy award. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Q: I interviewed Mad Men’s Matthew Weiner just before his show’s series finale, and he talked about how “the journey is the point,” and that the destination comes second—despite the typically extreme focus from fans on that last episode, on how a given show ends. Between the fervour around Orphan Black‘s last season and the various “death watches” to see who survives, do you feel like that idea of the journey gets lost?

A: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think it’s a lot of pressure put on the show, as you know, because there’s so many people who want to see it done a certain way, or have expectations of how it should look. But I mean, I think we just tried to be as true to the characters and kind of defend all those people that we’ve kind of built over the last few seasons, and just not have that outside pressure of it having to be this or that—to make sure that it stays personal and about the human relationships and the human experiences in this sci-fi world.

Q: Showrunners Graeme Manson and John Fawcett reportedly called an audible on the series finale from what was initially planned, pretty late in this last season. That’s a pretty rare thing; lots of TV shows, even long-running ones, have generally sorted out how they’ll end as part of the first-season process.

A: Yeah. I mean, I think—I don’t know exactly how to explain it, but it just sort of was about keeping it kind of personal, going back to what drew me to the project and what drew I think a lot of us to it was that even though it’s this kind of high-concept piece about clones and about corporations and all of that, it’s really about what makes us an individual, and how do we survive our upbringing, how do we thrive in our upbringing, what makes us the person that we are today, how we make decisions, and how we grow and accept our voices. So I think it just kind of came down to bringing it back to that – that sort of simple, personal thing.

Q: So without getting into the ending—since you should rightly not tell me any details about it—practically, what is that like to be a part of, being on set as the writers figure out a new way forward?

A: I think the cool thing about the show is that it has always had that mentality. The writers’ room has always been very flexible. And John Fawcett and Graeme Manson, who created the show, have always had this kind of very almost spontaneous way of working and writing. And you know, there were characters who popped up in season one who were supposed to be literally a one-scene character, and who then have become some of the staples on the show. I think Kristian Bruun’s character, Donnie, was supposed to have a very small part in the show, and by the end of it he’s a murderer who has killed one of the biggest villains on the show. And he’s, you know, twerked in his underwear and all this stuff, like, that I don’t think they ever planned. You know, that scene was, like, thrown into an episode because of something that happened on set. You know what I mean? So I think they’re really great at sort of seeing what’s working and what’s kind of exciting to them, and running with it, as opposed to sticking to some kind of plan, you know?

Q: So even though it’s this high-pressure thing, this ending that you know people are all focused on, that late being-in-flux experience felt of a piece of your time on the show?

A: Yeah. It’s not the most important episode, for some reason. You know, I think it is important and also I hope people enjoy it or are moved by it, but I don’t think that’s the ultimate goal, that it’s this perfect piece, but that it’s all part of the same thing.

Q: When people who’ve been associated with a show for a long time, they can look to others who have been through that for advice. Matthew Weiner, for instance, talked to Breaking Bad showrunner Vince Gilligan, just as Jon Hamm got advice from Bryan Cranston. Have you talked to other actors, actresses about how to move on from a show and, I suppose, many characters that have defined you?

A: Absolutely. I mean, people have been so supportive in it because I think it is a weird end of a chapter that meant so much and that really defined me in a lot of ways. And you know, since I was a kid, characters have always been, like, a huge, really defining part in my personality and my life. You know, so saying goodbye to one that felt so connected to me and that I had such a stake in it will be very bizarre. And I have been, you know, approached by people who have finished shows and sort of—not given advice, but given support in it, you know, which is really cool.

Q: And it must be particularly odd to say goodbye to not just one character you’ve played for a long time, but what’s the count at this point, like six or eight?

A: Yeah. I don’t know how many we’ve said bye to, but yeah, it was kind of a two-week process of saying good-bye to a lot of the cast. So every day somebody would wrap, or we would wrap a set, or we would wrap a clone or a character, and it was so emotional. Every time was kind of a different grief. And it’s just bizarre that that can happen, and it was just a nice testament to how much it meant to all of us, I think, to be part of it.

Q: And you see shows do their series wraps for actors as they do the last scenes of characters, and I imagine that would’ve been even harder just on account of the sheer number of series wraps you would’ve had to endure, on the final season as an actress playing clones.

A: Yeah. Totally. I mean, yeah, it was gross. I think my nose bled at one point because I was crying so hard and it, like, ruined a scene that we were shooting. The last Alison scene is like, if you pay close attention, maybe you’ll see my blood.

Q: When you first started, there weren’t a lot of powerful female lead role characters on TV, and then there you were, playing a clutch of them, basically. Have you seen things change over the last five years?

A: Yeah, and I think that we were kind of coming out at the same time of a few different shows that have these characters. You know, like House of Cards, Robin Wright’s character is so amazing. And Orange is the New Black had so many amazing female characters at the centre of it. Now I’m obsessed with Handmaid’s Tale, and there’s just so many—it just feels like a movement towards more storytelling that is female-centric and that is not just through men’s eyes. Like, we’ve seen that already so much, and it’s really refreshing to see so much emphasis put on women right now.

Q: You bring up Handmaid’s Tale, which is another Canadian co-production, much like Orphan Black is, right?

A: Yeah. Shot in Toronto.

Q: And it strikes me that the idea of Canada in these productions is interesting. There are, after all, a lot of shows being shot in Canada, and there’s a thrill in being Canadian and seeing your city represented, but also this strange kind of sadness when the show has Canada masquerading as another place altogether, that it’s not actually set there. Does that speak ill, in a way, of our civic cinematic identity, such as it is?

A: I don’t know. That’s such an intense phrase! Yeah, I mean, I don’t know if it is like a shying away from it looking too Toronto or something. But I think our show started out like that. Maybe there was, like, a bit of fear of it looking like Canada. But then by the end, we were referencing Scarborough or whatever, and we kind of had gotten over that. I don’t know. I think there’s a weird thing in terms of, like, marketing a show, where you kind of have to make everything feel like it’s in the States.

Q: And you’re sticking around in Toronto after the show wraps, instead of heading to L.A., as might be the typical path forward. What do you see in the future of the Canadian TV and movie scene?

A: I’m so excited about so many of the young filmmakers that are coming up. I’ve worked with a lot of first-time filmmakers here in Canada, and I continue to want to, and out of, like, any kind of patriotism, but just out of that’s where the interesting stories are. These are the scripts that I read that make me say, ‘This is amazing, this is so different, this is such a unique voice, and this director is so exciting and visually interesting. So I see a lot of things I’m so excited and hopeful about film and TV in Canada. There’s just a huge movement, I think, in seeking an identity as Canadians, and really forging it and really embracing all the parts of us as Canadians that come from such varied experiences and such varied cultures. And I think there are strong voices that come out.

Q: Going back to the idea of powerful female roles, it seems to me like sci-fi has a greater capacity than other genres for feminism. It’s a full subgenre; there are prominent feminist sci-fi authors like Ursula K. Le Guin or Octavia Butler. Is that your sense, that sci-fi has this potential to present a feminist vision of the future?

A: Yeah, I don’t know why that is—if feminism is a bit of a subversive movement as it is, putting it in a context of a dystopian society or something like that makes sense. I think the sci-fi world allows for exploration of that that isn’t on the nose and that isn’t preachy, but it’s kind of artful and explores it differently. I think you watch our show and we use the cloning thing as kind of a metaphor for exploring autonomy and individuality, the idea that we aren’t all homogenous and we don’t all fit into boxes; I think there’s more imagination in sci-fi. There’s more chance to kind of explore perspective and not have it so grounded in this world that we live in, which is so stuck in a patriarchal kind of system.

BBC America

Q: You got your start doing improv, and you’ve spoken a lot about how that has helped you in this role. Do you still get to do improv around town, you know, like ‘Hi, I’m Emmy winner Tatiana Maslany, I’m here to do some improv?’

A: Well, if I walked in like that, I mean, I would kick myself out if I walked in like that. Like, ‘Get out of here, you douche.’ [Laughs] No, I’ve done improv recently. I did a couple of shows in the States, which was really fun and at UCB [Upright Citizens Brigade], which was like a total dream for me. I love performing. I love doing improv. It’s a totally terrifying experience, but it’s something that I’ve always felt so strongly about and that I’m kind of obsessed with. And just as an actor, it’s a great exercise. It’s a great playground, you know, to try things out and to work on your skills. Because the mandate of improv is kind of the same as acting: It’s all about your scene partner, it’s all about being present and in the moment and exploring together as a team, a collaboration.

Q: You’ve talked about the importance of improv’s “yes-and” rule, the idea of being accepting of whatever comes, in these demanding roles on Orphan Black. But I think maybe more interesting for your own work is the improv rule of “make statements”—it feels like the show absolutely works to do that. Was that always the goal for the show, to make statements about diversity and representation?

A: I don’t think so, actually. I think John and Graeme were just kind of turned on by the ideas, and I don’t think, from what I’ve heard them talk about, it wasn’t like it was an accident that they started talking about these things and that it all kind of became about what our show’s about. But I don’t think they were setting out to do that. I think it was just naturally born of the kind of story we were telling and the themes. And we’ve got an amazing science consultant, Cosima Herter—she’s who Cosima’s based on in the show—and she’s just got such an incredible perspective not only on where we’re at historically in terms of science and the personal and political and all of that, but she really helped keep the show progressive and in line with what was happening in the world. So I think there were a lot of people kind of steering it in that direction.

Q: And speaking, perhaps, of feminism: You recently met Justin Trudeau on the set of Ryan and Kelly in Niagara Falls. What was it like to meet the Prime Minister?

A: He was lovely. He was, like, just as nice as you hope he is. He was very sweet.

Q: There are those who feel like his feminism isn’t particularly hard-earned, and that it represents a kind of political tactic. As someone who is an outspoken feminist, what is your sense of him, based on that meeting but also the news?

A: I mean, I’m not one to decide, you know, whose feminism is correct or not. I think there’s a lot of that happening as well. But I hope that this is just the beginning of a conversation and that politics continue to embrace different perspectives. It is very male-dominated, and so I’m excited to see that continue to change and grow. And if labelling it feminism helps that in some way, then that’s great. But I’m by no means saying, you know, that he isn’t a feminist. I think what he said in terms of representation in the House has been awesome.

Q: And there is an aspect to which, as you say, people look for perfection when there’s still work to be done.

A: Totally. And like, the idea that it’s finished—it’s done now, now we’ve succeeded. And it’s definitely not, and it’s very pervasive. It’s going to be a lot of work and – and kind of societal changing, but still I think we’re at least talking about it now.

Q: You’ve also been an outspoken advocate for LGBTQ communities, and so I was interested about mini-controversy that came out a couple of seasons ago, when you portrayed a trans clone, Tony. What was it like to see well-intentioned efforts to write a trans character that, for a lot of people, wasn’t received well?

A: I mean, I think that we were aware that that could have happened, and what we were excited about with Tony was just exploring identity in another way, which was gender identity, which is something we hadn’t kind of explored yet, and totally aware, you know, that it’s problematic for a cis gendered actor to play a trans character. And I definitely see that and I feel that, for sure. But by no means were we expecting to represent all of the trans community or even really speak about that. It was more so about identity and about individuals. And yeah, I mean, there are so many amazing trans actors now who have careers and that’s a very new thing that they’re able to be out and successful, and it’s awesome. Like, I’m such a huge fan of Trace Lysette and Laverne Cox, and I love what they’re doing for the trans community in terms of visibility and playing incredible characters.

Q: It must have been a tricky thing for you insofar that, you know, you kind of had to play that character as a woman—it is, after all, a show about clones. But then also, simultaneously, you’re trapped by the fact that there just hasn’t been a lot of transgender characters visible on TV, and trapped by the idea that, well, if there’s one, then this has to reflect all, because it’s such a rare opportunity.

A: Totally. And I think that’s why it’s difficult also for women when they watch TV and we see one version of a woman who is attached at the hip to a guy, and that’s kind of her whole thing. You kind of go, ‘I don’t relate to this, I don’t feel this.’ You know? Maybe somebody does, but not everyone. That’s the other thing about storytelling, is you can’t represent everybody. You know, you can’t seek to do that. You have to tell stories that you’re interested in talking about and characters that intrigue you, like Helena is nobody I’ve ever seen, and yet somehow I relate to her. Like, she’s a very specific character that is nothing like anybody I know but somehow she’s resonant to me.

Actress Tatiana Maslany holds her award for Outstanding Lead Actress In A Drama Series for “Orphan Black” as she mingles at the Governors Ball after the 68th Primetime Emmy Awards in Los Angeles, California U.S., September 18, 2016. (Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)

Q: You’ve talked about keeping your Emmy in a box under a pot of flowers because your mom has stashed it away, but also you demurred on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert about feeling like you didn’t deserve it, somehow. One: is it still in the box? And two: that just sounds like the most terrifying instance of impostor syndrome I’ve ever heard of, maybe.

A:[Laughs] Yeah. I mean, it’s – it’s in the box. It was great. It’s having a nice time. It’s very cozy in there. Yeah. I still don’t – don’t totally take it on as my own, but it was a wonderful honour and a very fun night.

Q: But what hope do we all have if – if you won’t accept that you totally deserved that Emmy?

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/television/tatiana-maslany-on-saying-goodbye-to-orphan-black/feed/0It’s no surprise the Internet’s Rihanna-Nyong’o film is getting madehttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/movies/its-no-surprise-that-the-internets-rihanna-nyongo-film-is-getting-made/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/movies/its-no-surprise-that-the-internets-rihanna-nyongo-film-is-getting-made/#respondTue, 23 May 2017 20:34:26 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=1020579Netflix is giving life to a viral concept for a movie with Rihanna, Lupita N'yongo and Ava DuVernay—but it's a mere extension of its existing methods

Actress Lupita Nyong’o and singer Rihanna attend the Miu Miu show as part of the Paris Fashion Week Womenswear Fall/Winter 2014-2015 on March 5, 2014 in Paris, France. (Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images)

When they inevitably write the oral history of how a crime flick involving four of Hollywood’s most prominent Black women went from social-media meme to movie, it will be the beginning that will prove most controversial. But most historians will likely point to a stray post on Tumblr, offering a wry caption to a 2014 Paris Fashion Week shot of a glamorous Rihanna and a bookish-looking Lupita Nyong’o from user elizabitchtaylor: “They look like they’re in a heist movie with Rihanna as the tough-as-nails leader/master thief and Lupita as the genius computer hacker.”

Whether that idea wended its way into Twitter, or if that plotline popped into someone’s mind apropos of nothing, is unclear. But what happened next is fairly straightforward. By late April, the prolific Black Twitter community got caught in the collective consciousness of the joking meme, and one user tweeted the idea at the Oscar-winning Nyong’o, who said she was in if Rihanna was—who then assented three days later. Emboldened, another Twitter user asked Ava DuVernay, a director whose Oscar-nominated work on movies like the Martin Luther King Jr. biopic Selma has made her one of the top names in the business; she was in. And then another asked Issa Rae, the creator of the YouTube web series Awkward Black Girl to write the screenplay; she responded with a gif of a cat, furiously typing.

And then almost exactly one month later, after a reportedly furious negotiation at the Cannes Film Festival, Netflix announced that it was actually going to make that film. And so an active community of the social-media network was able to turn a meme into reality, a moment that has been met with exultation and surprise. The people’s collective imagination giving birth to an actual thing in the world: what could be a more incredible thing?

The truth is, though, that there is only one thing surprising about the movie’s creation: how it took it so long. If anything, the whole process was merely a humanized illustration of how so many movies and TV shows are already being made: through data points and algorithms.

That’s not really new. The hunches and gut instincts of powerful studio executives have, for decades, been about connecting bankable stars with populist ideas, judged through simplistic metrics like box-office revenues or “quad segments” of audiences—male, female, over 25 and under 25. And film studios have long used focus groups to judge response; there have been countless tales of how focus groups forced changes to the endings of entire movies or the happy-ever-afters for potential love stories, from Blade Runner to Romeo Must Die to Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. But the use of actual data, rather than gut instincts and hidebound conventions, has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years. Test audiences and focus groups have been buttressed by big-data analytics. Social-media reaction and IMDB scores are being closely examined and forecasted. A 2015 article from the MIT Technology Review even did some simple data-mining to find the factors that drive successful movies (it found that established directors, more than big-name stars, were the primary driver of profits).

It is, in part, why we are trapped in a world of sequels, prequels, revivals and franchises; with huge budgets, distracted and fragmented audiences and plateauing sales, movie studios can ill-afford mistakes, and data gives them advice, even if it can tend to be boring and conservative. Reliable intellectual property like comics and toys and established fables, after all, offers some semblance of a guarantee of built-in audiences. It is, for instance, why the massive Sony leaks revealed that the studio was planning on stitching the ill-fitting Men In Black and 21 Jump Street franchises together—it was another effort to find a large, rich place in the middle of both profitable franchises’ Venn diagram. But even these rules are changing; look no further than the collapse of D.C. Comics’ former cinematic juggernaut, or the recent and epic $175-million boondoggle of Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur, which had stirred execs’ dreams of spawning a lucrative Marvel-like Camelot universe but wound up making a pathetic $14.7-million in North America in its first weekend, instead.

Elise Amendola/AP

But for as much as the major studios are beginning to harness data to influence artistic decision-making, Netflix has been among those at the vanguard, which has mastered algorithm-driven content creation—an art form reduced to a science. With nearly 100 million users around the world watching countless hours’ worth of TV shows and movies riddled with metadata, Netflix owns incredibly rich data sets, with more generated every second by the users themselves, the kind that makes film studios’ efforts look puerile in comparison. After all, Nielsen ratings only track select TV watchers, ticket sales can’t tell too much about whether audiences finished the movie or left for a washroom break, and analysis of social-media responses self-selects for people who actually want to share their thoughts. Netflix, on the other hand, knows exactly the point at which you pause, rewind or fast forward, when and where it is you watch content, and what terms you’re searching for; it can even assess how brightly lit or sound-mixed a movie or show should be, based on in-the-moment characteristics, to make incredibly granular decisions on what shows and movies it wants to make.

The 2013 hit House of Cards was their first major success in mining that data, tapping into what they know to build a Frankenstein’s monster of a show that was engineered to be a hit before anyone had even seen it. Its data told them that Kevin Spacey was a very popular actor among its user base, and that movies directed by David Fincher were too, and knew that people watched the original BBC House of Cards series on the platform. The rest was just a linking calculation away. “Netflix’s data indicated that the same subscribers who loved the original BBC production also gobbled down movies starring Kevin Spacey or directed by David Fincher,” wrote Salon’s Andrew Leonard. “Therefore, concluded Netflix executives, a remake of the BBC drama with Spacey and Fincher attached was a no-brainer, to the point that the company committed $100 million for two 13-episode seasons.” It was seen as an expensive risk at the time, a huge amount to invest to beat out the usual suspects. It then became, at the time of its release, the most streamed piece of content in 41 countries including the United States.

“Because we have a direct relationship with consumers, we know what people like to watch and that helps us understand how big the interest is going to be for a given show,” Jonathan Friedland, Netflix’s chief communications officer, told the New York Times. “It gave us some confidence that we could find an audience for a show like House of Cards.”

So making a movie helmed by Rihanna and Nyong’o, directed by DuVernay and written by Rae—a formula spat out by the urgings of the Internet itself—is a no-brainer. Of course it’s going to be at least a little bit popular: the Internet has spoken, just in a way beyond its typical tongue of data sets. Heck, there are decent odds that, somewhere in some back room, a machine has already spit out this cinematic combination.

If anything, it boggles the mind that the studios didn’t go all in on this film; no matter their feelings or capabilities in tapping into Big Data, a passionate Twitter demand for these specific people is a clear, human, data-driven symbol of built-in audience. Why wouldn’t they take them up on it? How could they let themselves get beat by Netflix, again?

With this Rihanna-Nyong’o heist movie, the real highway robbery may well be whatever Netflix paid to make it happen. It seems likely that the math will bear it out.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/movies/its-no-surprise-that-the-internets-rihanna-nyongo-film-is-getting-made/feed/0Meet Poo Bear, Justin Bieber’s—and pop’s—not-so-secret weaponhttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/arts/meet-poo-bear-justin-biebers-and-pop-musics-not-so-secret-weapon/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/arts/meet-poo-bear-justin-biebers-and-pop-musics-not-so-secret-weapon/#respondWed, 17 May 2017 10:23:59 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=1017693As an elite topline writer, Jason 'Poo Bear' Boyd has produced a pile of pop hits. So why does he still feel like he has plenty to prove?

Jason “Poo Bear” Boyd poses for a portrait in his house at Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, California on July 11, 2016. (Dustin Downing/Red Bull Content Pool)

When Jason Boyd—better known as Poo Bear—greets you, it’s cheerfully, if anachronistically: “Happy birthday.” When he says that to me from Los Angeles, it’s early May; my birthday is in July—which he couldn’t have known, anyway—and his isn’t until September, and he admits he prefers to keep his birthdays low-key.

But as a new documentary, Poo Bear: Afraid of Forever (out now on Red Bull TV) reveals, the reason behind his go-to salutation—”you know that feeling you get in the morning when you wake up on your birthday? You’re supposed to feel that way every day”—is reflective of a man of contradictions whose path to songwriter greatness has been quixotic but determined, amiable but hungry, this sonically omnivorous wanderer who’s meeting his big moment with odd discomfort.

After all, this is a man who has plied his trade for nearly two decades in the shadows that are typical of topline writers, helping on chords, lyrics, concept, and melodies that’s usually credited only in nearly anonymous liner notes for the likes of Usher, Chris Brown and Kelly Rowland. And while he’s won four Grammys and has scored four Billboard Hot 100 number one hits, no one really knew his name. But in the last couple years, after receiving public shoutouts from Justin Bieber for helping write smash hits “Where Are Ü Now” and “What Do U Mean”—he met Bieber at a 2013 party in Vegas and they quickly became friends—he’s begun to be recognized as a top producer, with atypical longevity in his field; his first big breakthrough came with the 2001 hits “Peaches and Cream” and “Dance With Me” by 112, and scored two Billboard number one songs this month by co-writing DJ Khaled’s summer 2017 smash “I’m The One” and assisting on Daddy Yankee’s “Despacito.”

Somehow, though, despite all the accolades, he admits he’s still afraid. That’s because the pop-music industry is cutthroat, a business that constantly asks “what have you done for me lately,” and where the behind-the-scenes songwriters and producers are often seen as disposable, chewed up and spit out in favour of the new young hotness in, on average, around four years. “One day, you’re looking up, trying to write another hit, and then you gotta end up getting a regular job,” says the 37-year-old. “That’s scary.”

In an interview with Maclean’s, Poo Bear talks about what makes a great pop song, shares his personal experiences in a ruthless music industry, gives advice to up-and-coming songwriters, discusses why songwriters might not want to seek fame, and explains what it was like being by Bieber’s side during the pop star’s year of arrests and controversies.

Q: I’ve written about music for some time, and you’ve been in it for nearly 20 years; you and I know that making a pop song is collaborative, with top-line writers, producers, and artists working together. But the average listener usually doesn’t know that. Does that surprise you?

A: No, it doesn’t surprise me, because I feel like it’s no different from a movie. Movie actors are acting, and they’ve taken a script that somebody else has written. It’s very similar. So it’s not surprising. Just because people want to believe what they see, and want to believe what they hear, and they definitely want to believe that it’s coming from that source, you know, in order for them…because they connect with that artist, they connect with that actor or actress, they connect with that character in the hopes that it’s really coming from them. And it’s not surprising at all that people still are kind of in the dark about that.

Q: And I’m sure you’ve heard this simplistic, common criticism of pop music: “Oh well, the person didn’t write it, so it’s not as good.” Have you heard that kind of criticism before?

A: I have, but I mean, here’s the thing. For me, most of the stuff that I’m doing with artists is a collaborative effort. So whether every line comes from the artist, for me, we still need the artist to get this great music out there. And you know, what’s a song without somebody singing it? It’s just a song. And then vice versa, what’s an artist without a song? It’s just an artist. And they go hand in hand. So you hear the criticism, but it’s like, great music is great music.

Nobody ever questioned Michael Jackson. You know, all of his hits were written by other people. So it’s just certain levels you get to where it’s acceptable, and it’s not. Nobody ever questions Bono, U2, or…there’s certain artists that make it to a certain level. And it’s not about who’s creating it—it’s about the product. Nobody cares who’s creating, you know, bleach or Tide when you wash your clothes. You just wash the clothes—it’s just a great product. So I just think that the criticism will always be there, but at the same time, good product is good product, no matter where it’s produced or created. It’s just great product. It should be out there for the world.

Q: It’s funny that you call it a product—a lot of people who say pop music is bad, the criticism is often that it is commercial, as if that’s a bad word. But what makes pop music so great—or even art—for you?

A: It’s just being able to do melodies, along with great wordplay and a concept. It’s cool because it just reaches the masses. Pop music—deriving from the word “popular”—for me, it’s just great to be a part of music that reaches a large amount of people and not just a small amount of people. And it just has so much more meaning to be able to reach all across the world, more than it being locked into a certain genre or a certain demographic—pop music allows everybody to hear this, and therefore it’s more effective and more people get a chance to say whether they love it or not.

Q: When do you know you’ve got a hit on your hands?

A: I just had this conversation with my manager yesterday and honestly, sometimes I know, sometimes I feel it. And then sometimes I don’t know, it turns out—and my manager will hear it and he’ll be like, ”That’s the hit.” And he’s right, he’s always been right. But for me, as long as I’m sticking to my formula and using all the components that I used before on my other records that were good, I feel like there’s a chance, there’s a high percentage that, as long as the platform and the marketing and everything that’s set up around the hit song is there, then it can become actually a successful song. So I don’t really know, all I know is that I use the same formula, and I stick to what I love, and that has gotten me a great reaction from my songs in the past. And there’s times when you might think something’s a hit and it’s not a hit. Or there’s definitely times when you think something’s not a hit, and it’s a hit. So I can actually honestly say that I genuinely don’t know. I can just go off of what I feel, and what I love, but you never know how the people are gonna take the song, you just never know.

(Jason Merritt/Getty Images)

Q: Those Justin Bieber songs, did you get the feeling that those were hits when you top-lined those?

A: Us working together on those records, we had a feeling that they were special. And they moved us and we were happy and we loved everything, honestly. And we just felt like we just wanted to get this stuff out there. And we were hoping that the world would share that feeling, were open to that feeling, and it would be mutual for how we felt during the creation of those records. And it turned out okay.

Q: I’ll say! But you know, being a topline writer must be strange, when so many of your songs come from personal experiences you have, and then for it to be sung by someone else. You’ve been homeless, for instance, and have written songs around that. Or that song, “No Pressure,” a song you did with Justin—

A: Yeah, definitely, my wife—before we even got engaged, she broke up with me and that record started from that feeling. And I ended up going in and Justin came and completed the idea for me. But it definitely derived from my wife breaking up with me at that time. It was like, you don’t have to make your mind up because I really wanted to be back with her and I really wanted to move forward and be a good guy. And definitely those actual actions came out in those words.

Q: Is that a weird feeling?

A: It’s not weird, because it was me, it was a collaborative effort. Justin’s always a part of this creative process even if an idea came from me, and it was some words and melodies there, Justin always came in and added to it in every situation. So, it was weird but at the same time, he was involved, he was a part of it, we did it together. And some people could look at it strange, but I just feel like all great records are a collaborative effort, no matter how you look at it.

Q: And that’s true of other songs, not just the ones you’ve written with Justin?

A: Yeah—at the end of the day, the artist that I’m working for, creating for, has to connect with it and they have to be able to put their own interest into it, in order for them to be able to sing it and for it to be real. They have to add their own stuff in, put their flavour into it, so when people hear it, it does connect with the fans, and it does come from a place where it’s like, “Whoa, I can relate to that artist.” Whether the whole idea or concept came from that artist or not, just them being involved in any shape or capacity allows for the artist to connect with the song and to perform it even better. And for the artist, and for the public, and the fans to connect with the artist. Just because they did have something to do with it, and it’s their voice, and they do agree with the feeling or they wouldn’t be singing it if they didn’t agree with what it was saying. So I definitely can still relate to the artist singing the words, even if they all didn’t come from the artist, it’s still a collaborative effort.

Q: You talk in the documentary about how songs are inspired by “dope concepts.” So—and maybe this like asking for the KFC special spice blend—what makes a “dope concept”?

A: For me, what makes a dope concept is it’s a fresh idea, something that I’ve never heard before. And so many songs, so many cliché concepts that when for me—if I’m in conversation or wherever I find my concepts from—to me that makes an amazing concept, just because it’s like stumbling upon a new discovery. And it’s like discovering a new planet, like “Whoa, I’ve never seen that planet before and nobody’s ever seen that… Let me introduce this planet that I just discovered to the rest of the world.” It’s something that’s simple and effective, that’s a complete thought within itself. Or, a concept that has a double meaning, a double entendre that might mean some people might take it one way, some people might take it another way. And ultimately, it might mean both things. So those for me, those are things that make a great concept.

Q: At one point in the documentary, the producer Matoma calls you a legend. Do you feel like one?

A: I don’t feel like a legend, man. It’s weird. That’s a great question. I don’t feel like—it’s weird because I always…I think it’s a normality for people to equate legendary-ness with age, and I think I’m a victim of that. Like, me feeling like I’m 37, I know I’ve done a lot of great things in my life and I’ve accomplished a lot in my life, and I just don’t know – I just feel uncomfortable calling myself a legend. I feel like if somebody comes to that conclusion on their own, then that’s cool. But for me, I wouldn’t call myself a legend, I just feel like I have so much to do. I feel like I’m just getting started. I’m just now tapping into something that can turn into something that’s legendary, but I just feel like…I don’t feel like a legend, man. Like I don’t. I just feel like I’m just beginning, I feel like I’m learning and I’m growing. I honestly don’t feel like a legend. When people say it, it’s even weird to hear it.

Q: It’s funny that you bring it up, because for me, you’re right, I think of a legend, I think of someone who’s hit the prime already, and it’s like a past tense kind of character.

A: Yeah like, 70 years old…like Forrest Gump. Like, 20 years in, it’s cool, it’s definitely longer than the average writer, producer, but still—I just feel like I have so much more to do in life. And honestly, I don’t know if I’ll ever feel like I’m a legend. People say to me, “You’re a genius, you’re great.” I don’t know if I’ll ever feel that way about myself. Some things I feel like are better left for other people to say, and I’m just not into like, tooting my own horn or bragging or anything. I just feel like I have so much more to do in life. And even once I’ve done so much more, I don’t even know—I’m not even sure if I’ll feel like I’m a legend at that time.

Q: And then the flip side of this legendary quality is that you get recognition and fame. Is that something you even wanted?

A: No, I never wanted that. Justin’s the first person to mention my name and to speak really highly of me on different interviews and stuff and that was weird, because I was so used to people taking credit and not sharing credit with me. It was almost like, “you don’t have to do that.” And he was like, “No, I want everybody to know that we did this stuff together.” And it was definitely strange for me cause I never really cared, I never wanted to be famous. I understand that it goes along with building a brand, and allowing you to go and charge more and everything, but for me—I always just wanted to be able to just buy my mom a house, and take care of my family. I never really felt like I had to be famous in order to do that. I just felt like I had to work really hard. So I never really wanted to be famous and I never expected anybody to put me out there like that. So Justin’s definitely the only person to mention my name, and I appreciate it. It’s cool to be recognized, but it’s not something that I was seeking or sought after. I never wanted to be famous.

Q: A lot of topline writers want to get in front of the mic in their own right. Is that something that you want to do?

A: No. I put out a couple songs when I was younger; a few years ago, I put out a mixtape, I put out a couple mixtapes. But I never did it to be famous. I was like, “Well, I could sing a little bit, let me see if I could generate some extra money, just to make a better life for everybody that I love.” It was like, if I could just get this song right here going on the radio, I could do some shows, and I could make a decent living, on the side of me writing songs, just to add more income. But other than that, I never had a desire. When I was younger, I wanted to be a singer, you know, with groups. But after a certain age I just realized that, really, I just wanted to be able to take care of my mom and my family, and if that was me writing songs, then that was cool.

Q: But a lot of topline writers do try, and some succeed, like Ne-Yo, or Sia, or John Legend. But a lot of them also fail; Ester Dean is an amazing topline writer but couldn’t cut it as a solo artist. Why do you think it’s hard for top-liners to make the leap?

A: Yeah, I think it’s just ordained, and I think that whatever’s meant to be in somebody’s life, will be. And I don’t think it’s something that anybody does right or wrong to get where they’re going. I just feel like maybe if it’s not your destiny, it’s just not your destiny, or it might not be your destiny at that time when you’re trying to make it your destiny. Maybe it’s just a timing thing.

I just feel like a lot of writers that wanna be artists, they do wanna be famous and they do wanna have that spotlight. And what I’ve noticed over the years is that most of these writers that have tried and have spent their own money investing in their own projects—they end up spending so much time focusing on themselves, that when that doesn’t work, and they go to try to come back in the writing for new artists, everybody’s onto the next writer. So I just notice a pattern of artists—writers getting so caught up on their own stuff, and investing time and money into their career—and then they look up and try to get back into writing and everybody’s like, on to the next person?

Just doing so, man, a lot of people shoot themselves in the foot ’cause they start focusing on their own stuff, but what’s really even got them to that point for them to be able to do that was writing for other people. So once you forget how you got to where you are, it’s tough to go into another field and do it when you got to where you were by writing for other people. So I always feel like if it’s something that happens organically, and naturally, without you actually trying and effortlessly, then I feel like it’s meant to be and it’s destiny. And that’s where I am with it.

Q: Record exec Clive Davis once said that pop singers need a “continuity of hits” to keep being relevant, and I imagine the stress is even more so for the people who are writing the songs.

A: One thousand per cent.

Q: And you talk about the cutthroat industry – do you have any stories of seeing how cutthroat that is up front, you know, in your own career?

A: For me, it was like, my first real experience with that, I was like younger than the average person. I was 12 years old, I was in the 7th grade, in middle school. I used to work with a group called Another Bad Creation. I wrote a rap and that rap was going out of a kids’ group called Kris Kross that were coming like, dissing ABC. And I wrote a rap dissing Kris Kross. And I wrote it for Red, for the lead singer, and I rapped it for him. And I wrote it down for him. And then I remember them disappearing for like, six months. And then I remember my friends coming in middle school, in class, in the morning, saying like, “Man, I heard that rap you did, on this album, on this Michael Bivins Biv 10 album,” and I was so excited, just cause I couldn’t believe it. And I heard it, and I started getting a little down because when I looked at the credits, the guy who stole it from me, he didn’t even get credit for it. His manager took the publishing. So that was like a very young age, me getting ripped off and just seeing how cutthroat, like just because you think somebody’s your friend, and you write something for somebody or you write something that’s for their project, it doesn’t mean they’re gonna give you credit. And cause I went through that at a young age, in a really cutthroat industry, and just getting ripped off from that, man, it was a learning experience. And it was cool for it to happen to me at such a young age, just so I could know, whoa—this is real and somebody just stole my song. And it came out and sold millions of records, so…

Q: What about experiences with the topline writer churn?

A: Oh yeah. That happened, definitely. The late 90s with my first success, with “Anywhere,” with “Peaches and Cream.” I thought it was a normality—you just write a song with an artist, and it comes out and goes on the radio, and it’s a hit, and you make money. And then you have a harsh reality of having a dry spell, where it’ll be two or three years where you won’t have anything on the radio. And you start questioning yourself like, “is this for me?”

And then you understand that those initial hits, they were accidents. I didn’t know what I was doing when I did it. It was just something that just happened. It wasn’t like I had a formula, or a style—it was something that I was just blessed to write with 112 and those records came out and they were hits. So doing it, separating from them and then not being part of machines like Bad Boy Music, it allows you to see that it takes a lot.

It’s like hitting the lottery to have a hit song. It’s not something that you just do. So that’s definitely discouraging and it comes a time where you wanna quit, you start thinking, “well, I need to do something else,” and then you just keep going and you just hope for the best, man. And definitely can be discouraging not having songs on the radio or on the charts in two or three years, but it just shows how persistent you are. If you really want it, if you’re really working hard, there’s a chance that you could do it again. It was accidental success, but it doesn’t mean that success can’t happen again if you surround yourself with the right people and you work hard and you’re honest with yourself.

Q: Something that struck me is this: In the National Football League, running backs’ careers are short, because of all the punishment they take and the athleticism they need to succeed. So even though they’re massive stars, they are seen as being past their prime by 30. People call the league “Not For Long” because of how disposable the NFL treats some of these players, who happen to be predominantly young Black men. And I wondered if there’s a similarity; the music industry has a lot of topline writers who are young people of colour. Is that something you’ve seen? Is there a relationship there?

A: I wouldn’t say that it’s just people of colour. There’s a lot of top-liners who are all races. I think that the music, the most current and relevant music that’s popular right now has been…yeah it’s definitely equal, it’s equal. With certain urban records, like the Drake records, and certain big urban records, it’s definitely more people of colour. But at the same time, you have a lot of hits of people that are not of colour. And I just feel like it’s a balance. I wouldn’t say that it’s more of a colour thing than it would be just a human being thing, honestly. Over the years, it’s like a healthy balance.

Q: It occurs to me also that it’s crazy that when you first hooked up with Justin Bieber, you had what, won four Grammys at that point?

A: Yeah.

Q: And yet many people felt it was a risk that he was taking, by jumping in with you and not, say, someone like legendary producer Max Martin.

A: Definitely, they did say that.

Q: What a weird thing, though. Because again—you won four Grammy awards! What were your thoughts on that at the time?

A: I was blessed to be part of those records that won those Grammys. And I just feel like people have their own perspective of what writers they want to be with what artists, and I feel like Max Martin is one of the greatest, man—22 number-ones, that’s amazing, it’s insane. I was extremely blown away by the fact that I was chosen, that I was blessed enough to write on that project. And even more, I don’t think it had anything to do with Grammys, more so than just Justin feeling like there was great music. And I think that outweighed everything else.

I don’t think people even looked at my success before. A lot of people didn’t even realize what I had done when I was working with Justin, nobody knew. Like I said, Justin was the first artist to mention my name. So I had done so much without anybody saying my name that people couldn’t even relate or say, “Oh wow, Poo Bear did this, he’s responsible for that.” So it wasn’t even an accolade thing, it was more like: nobody knew me. And I kind of liked it like that. I like being in the background. You can’t get tired of something that you don’t know.

Justin took a chance. He believed in his heart. He believed in what he loved and what we were creating, and I’m forever loyal to him for that.

Q: And there’s a flip side of people knowing about you: There was a lot of criticism of you in 2013, because at the time, Justin Bieber was involved in a series of controversies, and you were part of his entourage; at one point, you were even blamed for contributing to it. What were your thoughts on all of that, as it was happening?

A: For me, in life…everybody has to have their scapegoat. And everybody has to have somebody to blame. I just feel like everybody goes through things. Justin was very strong-minded and he was going through stuff on his own. And I happened to meet up with him at a place of his life where he was young, he was doing things that he wanted to do, and all I could do was just be there and support him. It was a lot of allegations and a lot of things that were said. But at the same time, you know, it’s just tough, man, on a teenager, and it’s tough on him being a superstar. And then for me, I’ve never worked with anybody on that level. So even for me coming in, for him—he was already doing what he was doing, and I just came in and all I was doing was just writing and being there with him.

And of course, everybody has to have somebody to blame. So of course, they choose the black guy to blame, and I was there to take that blame. And at the same time, you can’t control anybody, you can’t make somebody do anything or not do anything and all you can do is just be there and support. And I went through a lot of ridicule for that, and I’m just glad that the world saw that we came out of that ridicule. And even Justin being accused of so much…it was so false, it was so many lies that the media made up to sensationalize his story for ratings. I’m just glad that everybody’s seeing the more good side and the more positive side, and the media, finally—you know, everything turned around. And it was a really dark period but I’m just glad that we’re both out of that. And nobody’s blaming anybody anymore. They’re just buying his records and buying his tickets to see him perform.

Q: You’ve produced all kinds of music, from country and reggae to folk and comedy and, of course, pop.

A: Yeah, all that stuff is creating, man. I love making music. If I could make music to make people laugh, then that’s what I wanna do. If I could make music that can touch other peoples outside of English, then I wanna be a part of it. And reggae, Jamaican music—I just love music. So I feel like I can apply my formula that I use to write, and I can apply it to any genre, I can apply it to any language. And I feel like it’ll have the same outcome.

I haven’t met anybody else that has done as many different genres as I have done. I’ve seen a lot of writers, I’ve seen a lot of legends, but when I look at what they’ve done, it’s usually like one thing—like one specific, one particular sound that they stick to. For me, I moved to Jamaica, I lived in Kingston for six months. And I wrote a couple of albums on Jah Cure, like big reggae hits. And then I’ve done a couple of comedy albums that are coming out, they’re finished and just about to be released with a really cool platform. I just feel like I haven’t met any other writer that bounces around to different genres: they’re focused on making a hip-hop record hit, or they’re focused on making a pop hit, or they’re just focused on making a country hit. So for me, I always like challenging myself cause I just wanna know that I can do it. And for me, I just love pushing myself and seeing how many boundaries I can cross. And I can’t say that I’ve seen any other songwriter. Maybe there are other songwriters who can do different genres like that—I just haven’t met ‘em.

Q: So that’s your advice for young writers?

A: Focus on one thing until you get it really good, and then I would say yeah, go outside your comfort zone. See what else you can do because you never know what genre your next hit’s gonna come from. It allows you to plant more trees. It’s cool to be able to plant apple trees and get apples, but it’s cool to be able to plant a grapefruit tree or an orange tree as well. You never know. Your grapefruit tree, your orange tree, might produce just as much fruit as your apple tree. So it’s cool to get like, let me get the science of planting a really good apple tree and making sure it produces the best apples. But then, you know, once you do that, why not try other trees?

But I would say: become great at planting one type of tree before you just start spreading yourself thin. You wanna be able to have some success with one thing before—instead of trying to do it all at once. Because you’ll look up and everything will fail. But if you get one tree down pat, then you’ll be like, “wait a minute, I could use that same soil, that same water, that same sun to grow this different type of tree. And I’ll grow a different type of tree with different fruit.

So, I’ll definitely say to younger writers: get great at one thing, but then apply that one thing, apply that formula—how you did that one thing—to other things. You never know.

Q: “I’m The One” just debuted at number one on the Billboard charts. I don’t know if people know how hard it is get even one; Drake just got his first, with “One Dance.”

A: Yeah! After all the success he’s had. So that just lets you know how hard it is—you could be the biggest artist in the world and still not have a number one. So it’s a blessing, man – just to be able to do it more than once, more than twice is pretty cool. And hopefully we keep it going, man. My honest, my goal is just, hopefully, God willingly, I wanna put out five number ones this year. And we don’t have that much time, but John Lennon, Paul McCartney—these were writers that were able to, and they’re in the history books as being a part of five number one songs in one year. So that’s my goal, for this year—I’m gonna need five in order to tie with John Lennon and Paul McCartney. That’d be a great accomplishment for myself. That’d be really cool.

Children’s toys are typically not so exciting; they’re often riffs off the latest big movie or TV show, or gussied-up versions of old reliable games and toys. But the latest toy fad might just leave your head spinning.

Fidget spinners—a tripartite ball bearing studded with three weights that reels around with a flick of the finger, intended as tools offering relief to those with ADHD—have been co-opted as the latest toy trend, found pinched in the hands of kids around the world. In the last few months, they’ve become ubiquitous among the younger set regardless of attention span, turned into toys as videos of fidget spinner tricks and Reddit communities gain fans in the thousands; they’ve been banned in swaths of schools; studies have been issued and rebutted over whether kids without ADHD playing with fidget spinners are actually productive in increasing focus in classrooms. As of the time of publishing, 19 of the 20 most popular toys on Amazon are fidget toys.

Let it first be said that the retroactive justifications from parents and scientists that the spinner may improve focus for all kids—that somehow giving a child a toy helps them do one thing easier—feels like someone endorsing weeks-old takeout, just because it didn’t give you food poisoning last time. Let it also be said that trusting kids in their claims that toys help them focus is a child-pushed argument that’s so brazen that 12-year-old me—who would lay out my case to my parents that buying Pokemon cards was actually some kind of fiduciary investment with the potential for high returns on the resale market—can’t help but stand and applaud.

But its role as a focus-stealer isn’t the fidget spinner’s true sin. It’s that they are mind-numbingly boring.

Ball-bearing tools have been around since ancient Rome. They’re in your boring computers; they’re in your boring engines; they’re in your boring bikes, and your boring kitchen appliances. If we’re co-opting basic tools as toys, we might as well just rebrand them into Riveting Rivets and Ronnie the Wrench so kids can get to work in literal Fun Factories. Even the argument that they are effective productivity devices actually hinges on the idea that they are boring—the physical equivalent of a white noise machine.

Here is an adult man, in one of the more popular YouTube videos about fidget spinners, forlornly considering what went wrong with his life to get him to this place.

But fidget spinners are really just the latest in a long line of boring toy trends to dominate kids’ minds. Before the spinning whirr came the incessant kerplunk of kids trying to flip plastic bottles with a little water in them so they landed upright; though the bottles were half-full, the spirit of the activity was surely half-empty. Before that, there were hoverboards—massive deceptions, given that they were just non-hovering segways made more dangerous by the deletion of a support pole—and, of course, Hatchimals, lauded by the industry, with awards like the 2017 Innovative Toy Of The Year award at the prestigious New York Toy Fair. But even they were just a massive coup of rebranding, a more irritating Kinder Surprise without any of the pleasures of eating chocolate that basically becomes a Furby. And once it’s born, the Hatchimal just makes needy demands that require disproportionate time and energy. Where’s the fun in that? (On this, parents might feel some common ground.)

But there’s more here than the mere fact that I, an ostensible adult, can’t get behind toys for kids these days. There’s a greater potential cost—one that’s much less an indictment of our children, and says more about the lack of innovation and creativity in the industries helping to shape their young minds.

After all, a vast array of studies show that playing—an act that will invariably involve toys—fosters social and cognitive skills, while cultivating creativity and imagination among younger children. And according to a report from Sarah M. Fine, of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, “intellectual playfulness” remains a valuable thing to cultivate for high-school aged students, often the ones playing with water bottles and spinners. “Playful learning in adolescence is certainly not the same thing as playful learning in early childhood … But this does not mean that it is any less important,” she writes. “To the contrary, finding ways to support adolescent learners in learning playfully is more critical because it is less intuitive.” Kids’ toys should meet these needs—to encourage creativity, to focus on play value, to be better.

“When I was designing toys, I would either go for something that was emotionally endearing to a child, or have play value—and ideally, I always wanted to have my toys teach kids something,” says Canadian inventor Wayne Fromm, whose own creations include the popular Beauty and the Beast Magic Mirror and who was a leading marketer of Crazy Bones. “Do these spinners teach kids anything? I’m not sure.”

The fact that current toys aren’t doing that is a reflection of ongoing shifts in the toy industry, he says. Physical toys are appealing to a narrower slice of children as iPads and apps are introduced to younger and younger kids, says Fromm: “They outgrow the concept of having a physical toy earlier.” That trend hasn’t spurred significant changes to how toys are sold, either; a small concentration of toy creators and distributors is actually working to staunch true toy innovation to meet these evolving terms, much in the way that major movie studios are content to produce sequel after sequel, loath to try new things when comfortable profits are at stake. “I’ve created many toys, and I would take them to the executive panel of Toys R’ Us and Walmart, and if they weren’t going to buy that product, that product wasn’t going to get made—there was no point,” says Fromm. “Doesn’t mean the toy wasn’t good, it just means the big-box stores weren’t going to support it, and now everything has to be vetted by all the big players—Hasbro, Mattel, Spinmaster.” And so, with the industry centralizing into a few massive leaders—a 2013 report found that the top five U.S. toy companies hold more than 50 per cent of the market—companies producing physical toys are now leaning more than ever on the success of a strong few. When Mattel reported declining revenues in 2014, its CEO was clear about why: “We just didn’t sell enough Barbie dolls.”

Kelly Ingram reacts while receiving a Hatchimal, a top toy of the season, at Walmart’s Black Friday event in Bentonville, AR on Nov. 24, 2016. (Gunnar Rathbun/AP Images for Walmart)

Indeed, the fact that the market remains loaded with toys that are specific to boys and girls—homemaking toys and princess dolls advertised to girls, cars and industrious construction toys for boys—is tied into the forces behind the innovation drain. Despite studies suggesting that targeted toys helps hem boys and girls into prescribed gender roles by influencing career choices, those big-box stores are only now seeing the capitalist value of challenging those stereotypes. Indeed, the first offerings from Debbie Stirling, the founder of GoldieBlox—now one of the industry’s hottest names, selling toys aimed at inspiring an affection for sciences among girls—were rebuffed by bigwigs at the New York Toy Fair, the make-or-break hub and haven for the latest in toy trends. “They said girls don’t like engineering. Girls don’t like building. That’s a boy play pattern. Girls want to be princesses, they want to play fashion. Go look at the pink aisle,” she said in an interview with Public Radio International.

There is one upside, perhaps, to at least the fidget spinner and the water-bottle flipping: it seems bad toys are forcing kids to find fun in other ways, like finding water (or in this case, flipped water bottles) in the desert. It feels like an active outgrowth of actual toys failing to make a mark on youth, causing kids to make do with what they have around—empty bottles, cheap ball-bearings—rather than the staid items being marketed at them. And it might be something the toy industry should consider as a warning sign; while toy sales continue to grow—Canada’s sales rose six per cent, to just over $2 billion—the actually number of toys sold are roughly flat, a quiet sign of a deteriorating market. It represents a disruption to the field that could loosen the grip of those big-box retail stores—and make innovation easier to achieve.

After all, a non-toy improvisation was the initial inspiration for the original fidget spinner, created by a Florida inventor who was injured while caring for her young daughter. “I couldn’t pick up her toys or play with her much at all, so I started throwing things together with newspaper and tape then other stuff,” she said in The Guardian. “It wasn’t really even prototyping, it was some semblance of something, she’d start playing with it in a different way, I’d repurpose it.”

Maybe that’s the best way to spin this latest trend—that children, failed by an unadventurous toy industry, have turned tchotchkes into playthings, so they can play on anyway. And good for them. After all, we must move forward, not backward; upward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling toward innovation.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/society/why-are-childrens-toys-so-boring/feed/2Why Drake’s ‘More Life’ works as a ‘playlist’http://www.macleans.ca/culture/arts/why-drakes-more-life-works-as-a-playlist/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/arts/why-drakes-more-life-works-as-a-playlist/#commentsSun, 19 Mar 2017 00:55:22 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=993761'More Life?' More like 'more plays.' Drake's latest project is a sonic joyride that works because of its platform: music streaming

After various delays and numerous false starts, Drake is back—did he ever really leave?—with his streaming-services “playlist,” More Life. It’s not quite an album—it’s more casual than that—and it’s not quite a mixtape; it’s more slickly produced than your typical EP. So the fact that the Canadian rapper who charged up the hip-hop game and now towers over the genre from his CN Tower perch has urged us to refer to this project as a “playlist” just leaves us asking more questions.

One thing is for sure: More Life certainly means more music. And to that end, it’s a triumph, an 81-minute globetrotting tasting menu of his comfortable guises: trap Drake, grime Drake, house Drake, afrobeat Drake. It is full of gem-like pleasures, from the summer-succulent “Passionfruit” to the recorder-whistling flow-off on “Portland” to the lissome “Teenage Fever,” complete with a delicious sample of ex-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez.

But it’s also more than that. More Life allows Drake to use the specific framework provided by a still-emerging art-distribution platform in service to his art and his brand. No one quite knows how to harness music streaming-services for their artistic ends—but More Life shows Drake is willing to give it a shot.

Clocking in at 22 songs, More Life is part of an ongoing musical trend: The biggest and buzziest pop records these days are also, increasingly, literally the biggest. Ed Sheeran, The Weeknd, Zayn Malik, Kanye West and more have all put out recent albums that include 16 songs or more. The reason for this, it seems increasingly clear, is simple gamesmanship: as Billboard charts weigh traditional album sales less and streams more, more streams means higher chart positions. And when services pay musicians based on per-song plays, more songs also generally means more money. All this has made music into something of a numbers game—and that might be distressing for the music fans who believe that the best albums are as they used to be: sitting at around 10 concise songs, all-wheat, less-chaff.

It’s a reminder that Drake just released his divisive fourth album, Views, in April—a high-stakes project, given that it was his first as the clear king of rap, and one criticized for being overlong and over-serious. His devotion to album craftwork is well-known—he and his coterie are very careful, talented sequencers of songs, and his earlier work might best be described as “music to overthink your love life to”—but Views, for all its successes, certainly sounded like something worked over into near sterility. The fact that it was somewhat sonically hemmed in by its concept—Caribana-inspired jams and spare, empty-tundra beats, reflecting summer and winter in Toronto—didn’t help, either.

So enter More Life, which does away with any lingering uncertainty about his status that came from Views. Putting out a “playlist” rather than an album frees Drake to be more casual with it while also trying to reject the idea that an overlong project is a necessarily bad one. (It may be no coincidence that More Life comes in at exactly the same runtime as Views.) It’s a message that’s afforded by streaming-services, taking advantage of the ability to send out a pile of songs all out at once in a thump; the sheer number of songs lets Drake range around and, in a way that an album might not allow, affirms his reputation as a sonic chameleon. And to call it a “playlist” links it in the name with music-streaming’s primary canvas—a curated sampler set, rather than the artistic statement of an album. Indeed, it’s a looser Drake that makes More Life work: it’s jauntier, more experimental, more free-wheeling, and, frankly, better than Views. “It was kinda getting tough to go, ‘Hey, I’m dropping a mixtape, but it’s for sale on iTunes,’ ” he said in a Beats Radio interview with DJ Semtex. “I didn’t really want people to say, ‘Oh, this is [his] next album.’ ” More Life isn’t a hyped concept album, intentionally—it’s a pile of new songs. That’s far harder to criticize.

Art, after all, has always been influenced by the technology of its time and the way it is distributed. A pop song is generally three minutes long because that was what would fit on 10-inch records in the 1900s. The reason an album generally lasts around 10 songs is that 33-rpm 12-inch records generally hold 22 minutes a side. But these are new rules. And much as Netflix’s ability to put out entire original series at once to be binged by viewers has changed TV storytelling—allowing showrunners to be more lackadaisical in their hook points, confident that audiences will be there when the credits force a new episode in 30 seconds—streaming services offer musicians the ability to play with their canvases. A playlist can give an artist a way to make money in music’s numbers game; a playlist can give an artist more freedom to romp (see: the exciting sonic moves in “Get It Together” and “Madiba Riddim”, or Giggs’s comically rapped-out Batman anthem to close out “KMT”); a playlist can give insight to an artist; it can even offer artists plausible deniability, since if the playlists are pre-labelled as non-album work, the songs can be explained away as separate from a musician or band’s canon.

This isn’t some kind of bold new innovation on Drake’s part, of course; mixtapes have long served as amuse-bouches between “proper” albums, perhaps no more visibly than for Drake’s own mentor, Lil Wayne. But here, the Six God has harnessed the framework of music streaming to send a message about his career, and could well allow him to update his TakeCare-eraboast that he “got rich off a mixtape”; he might be the first to put a mere playlist on the charts. Either way, More Life does serve to highlight the new rule in the new normal for music listening. More.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/arts/why-drakes-more-life-works-as-a-playlist/feed/1Why the Oscars mix-up was the Academy’s worst-case scenariohttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/movies/why-the-oscars-mix-up-was-the-worst-case-scenario-for-the-academy/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/movies/why-the-oscars-mix-up-was-the-worst-case-scenario-for-the-academy/#commentsMon, 27 Feb 2017 16:17:41 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=987323The 'Moonlight'-'La La Land' mistake is an absolute nightmare for an Academy that is now left exposed in an impossible situation

It’s only right that a night devoted to celebrating a highly manicured kind of movie magic was lost in an act of live TV mayhem. The lyrical black gay American coming-of-age flick Moonlight won the Oscar for best picture, which would have been a shock on its own—defeating frontrunning musical La La Land—if it didn’t come before the most epic gaffe in Oscars history, the night’s top prize being handed to that very frontrunner for a few confusing minutes before the record could be corrected, dramatically shattering those hearts on stage. But it was more than just a mere mistake: It was an excruciating nightmare scenario that even the finest Oscar-winning screenwriters couldn’t have penned for a much-assailed award show. On a night when the Academy actually got it right, one irrevocable Chekhov’s-gun envelope put two films—including one freighted with every cultural signifier of note in 2017—in horrible positions, and cast into doubt what the Oscars are even supposed to mean anymore.

Let’s start with how we got here. The reporting will surely come out in due time, but the footage itself tells a story: Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, the stars of Bonnie and Clyde, took the stage to announce the Best Picture winner, but appear to have been given the envelope for the Best Actress award, which had just gone to La La Land‘s Emma Stone. (A story on the Huffington Post, amazingly up two days before the awards, explains the failsafe measures that did not appear to go off; a separate Oscars explainer at the L.A. Times reports that the two PricewaterhouseCoopers accountants in charge of the cards each have one envelope per category, which explains why Emma Stone and Beatty wound up clutching two of the same cards.)

Beatty then opened the envelope, and started shaking and stuttering, clearly having trouble with both the card and its text. This was the first sign something was amiss—even though he is 79, he remains an unflappable figure. But on such a massive stage, when you are cast under a spotlight and expected to simply read what is on the card, it is a testament to Beatty that he paused, hoping for someone to come to his aid in an impossible situation. When he showed it to Dunaway, quietly muttering “Emma Stone” to her in confusion, she wound up grabbing it and reading the card instead, and she too was blameless; in a moment where she felt her former film partner was succumbing to the moment, and you are impatient during that long moment, it is fair that you would want to grab the card and quickly scan for the name of the movie that you can see on the card. The fact that it was a card for La La Land put the pair in an exquisitely intractable position.

There would be no salvation for them, as social media has already begun to skewer them unfairly. By the time the words were said, La La Land‘s cast and crew had stormed the stage—as one does.

In a way, it feels deserved that this happened to the Academy. The Oscars have long (but not always) treated the night with a gloved-hand reverence, a night of telling itself the story it wants to tell about the importance of the movies. It’s not always the right story, and often, those stories are historical redresses for mistakes of years past. After all, each year, predictions for best actor/actress categories are based as much on talent as whether or not they had already won, or whether the Oscars felt it was “their turn.” Cinema’s biggest night is an evening of storytelling about itself, and that story is often a self-important, smug one that believes that societal change, as host Jimmy Kimmel said in his night-gone-awry, must “start with us,” as if celebrity inherently means moral leadership and every Oscar-winning movie from Mrs. Miniver to The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King sparked a revolution.

Donald Trump’s presidency has been a call to arms (or at least passive-aggressive shade) for the Hollywood set—look no further than the standing ovation for Meryl Streep, ostensibly for her 20 career Oscar nominations but more likely for her public spat with the President. So all night, we saw it. The Salesperson’s victory was something of a surprise in the face of clear frontrunner Toni Erdmann, but it felt fated when its director boycotted the show over Trump’s ban. White Helmets took the best documentary short category and the fact that its Syrian cinematographer Khaled Khatib was barred from entering the country surely did not hurt its chances. And for one glorious moment, with the victory of a movie about a gay black American—a beautiful film made even more appealing to the Academy for its one-stop identity shop—the Oscars had an opportunity to erase the moments that Crash beat Brokeback Mountain, and try to slide a lid over the gasoline fire of #OscarsSoWhite accusations.

Now, with one gaffe, the Oscars instead slung a bucket of water on the gas fire. What should have been a capping moment on its careful narrative wound up being knee-capping; the cherry on top of the frilly cake it was trying to build itself wound up being rotten and poisonous. The Oscars got hoisted on its own petard—through no real fault of the Academy itself.

Host Jimmy Kimmel, left, and presenter Warren Beatty discuss the results of best picture as the casts of “La La Land” and “Moonlight,” winner of best picture, react on stage at the Oscars on Sunday, Feb. 26, 2017, at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. (Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP)

More troubling is how it’s exposed a real, more existential problem. “It’s just an award show,” Kimmel said in a game effort to try to douse the many four-alarm blazes when La La Land and Moonlight‘s crew met, in the ecstasy of highly viewed confusion, on stage. He was wrong and right, and the Oscars are now an impossible situation in between. We have to either believe in the Oscars’ message of self-importance, that there is power in cinema to change society, and therefore read deeply into the meaning of the mistake, or we dismiss this gaffe—and the awards—as being unimportant. We either believe in the Oscars’ claim that representation matters and thus harp on what it means that Moonlight‘s big moment was, or we say the Oscars are just an award show. Either the Oscars are a celebration of self-serious art, or we chalk this up to innocent frivolity. Both are convincing ways forward, but we can’t have it both ways.

So now, the Oscars and Moonlight’s well-earned victory will no longer be a narrative of merits, but instead one of optics and politics. This was the world we wanted, an acknowledgement that the political is everywhere. And that is still true. But it’s no longer mere acknowledgement; it’s become an absorbing obsession. We saw it at the Super Bowl, an orgy of concussions and capitalism that became an indictment of the presidency; we saw it at every step of this year’s movie awards season; we saw it in Adele’s Grammy win over Beyonce; we saw it in the glee some took in La La Land’s unfathomably cruel heartbreak. (We should remember that representation goes beyond actors and stories. The Oscars are a reminder that making a movie is a huge undertaking involving the work of massive teams, with cast, crew and tech striving to put something bigger than themselves together. We don’t know how diverse all teams were, but it’s another reason we shouldn’t in this unique pain.) And there will be people who will feel like Moonlight’s win wasn’t earned, that there is an asterisk on what should have been a purely joyous moment in part because of the politics imbued in it that now threaten to consume it. On this note, perhaps this nightmare was actually the second-worst possible situation; imagine if Moonlight’s name was wrongly read, and La La Land had won instead. But the horror of that potentiality only proves that, amid Trump’s presidency and the thoughtful debate over identities, the political isn’t just personal, and it is no longer just one way we interpret art—it’s become nearly everything. With this year’s award season now over, it might be useful to take a step back and assess if that’s the single frame through which we want to perceive art.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/movies/why-the-oscars-mix-up-was-the-worst-case-scenario-for-the-academy/feed/20How memeable moments could help world leaders with their Trump problemhttp://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/how-memeable-moments-could-help-world-leaders-deal-with-their-trump-problem/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/how-memeable-moments-could-help-world-leaders-deal-with-their-trump-problem/#commentsMon, 13 Feb 2017 21:16:07 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=982439Many world leaders need America—but regard Trump as potential political poison. Abe and Trudeau may have offered a new way forward.

A screenshot from a video of the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe making a face after shaking hands for 19 seconds with Donald Trump. (YouTube)

It became, rather quickly, the side-eye seen around the world. Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, visiting the White House as the second foreign dignitary to witness up close the early, lurching presidency of Donald Trump, endured a 19-second handshake in front of the snapping jaws of the world’s press. In those interminable seconds—roughly as long as it took Usain Bolt to run 200 metres—Trump pumped the prime minister’s hand as if it were the lone spigot in a desert, patted it as he might the bottom of a wayward infant, and—after asking Abe what the Japanese photographers were yelling, and misunderstanding Abe’s response of “please, look at me”—stared unwaveringly into his eyes. So when the leader of the world’s third-largest economy by nominal GDP finally broke free from Trump’s literal clutches, he looked askance and scooted back in his seat, desperate for the visual solace of his aides—widening his eyes with a sigh, the universal sign for yikes.

The moment was met, among those on social media, with delight. It did not matter that no intentional impudence was confirmed by Abe or his people; the 19-second-long act was enough for the mostly liberal cliques on social media to regard Abe as a kind of shady hero. Never mind that intention was never ascribed to or confirmed by Abe, or that the pair would be later pictured hugging, when the heat of the media spotlight waned; “Shinzo Abe’s Facial Expression After Shaking Hands With Trump Will Give You Life,” wrote the progressive women’s site Bustle, as GIFs of the moment ping-ponged across Twitter and Facebook.

It happened again when Justin Trudeau and Donald Trump met for the first time, sitting for their official, formal-handshake portrait. The shake itself was far quicker—less than a fifth of the time Trump spent clasped to Abe—and Trudeau managed to dodge Trump’s trademark pat-and-pump. But when the president offered the prime minister his hand, an avuncular put-‘er-there of the sort typically reserved for tobacco-spitting coaches and their Little League charges, a relaxed Trudeau looked at it wanly, for the briefest but surest instant suggesting the reticence and sanctimony that many in the left wanted him to show. The Internet, as is its way, blew up with GIFs, memes, and jokes. (And he wasn’t alone in his moment of shade; a PMO-approved handout photo of the women-in-the-workplace roundtable featured Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland appearing to give Trump an incredulous look.)

But both moments may have been more than mere frivolities or one-off oddities. They could mark the first in a string of delicate social-media-driven power plays by world leaders—especially left-leaning ones for whom an open embrace of Trump would constitute political poison back home—to both woo the support of America’s military and economy while signalling, subtly enough that it can be disabused but amplified outside their control by the Internet, that they do not care for the man at the helm. Abe’s side-eye and Trudeau’s handshake hesitancy could be the start of politicians converting the Internet’s cants and shibboleths into a kind of political cover—the weaponizing of political optics in a fight heavily weighted against any country that isn’t the United States.

Abe and Trump may actually have quite a bit in common. Both find their ideological homes in the right, and both came to power on the strength of bold, branded economic projects. Abe has even been accused of fanning nationalist flames in the face of China. But as one of the longest-serving prime ministers in a country that has proven somewhat fickle about its leaders—and heading an economy that relies heavily on American investment—his visit to Washington needed to take into account the prevailing winds in Japan. And those were not good: an October poll found that only three per cent of people in Japan believed that Trump was the best choice to be president; another poll, this one conducted after the election, found that 37 per cent believed the U.S.-Japanese relationship will worsen, while 58 per cent believed instability will rise.

The balance is even trickier for Trudeau, held up as one of the few remaining champions of liberalism and globalism in the world. A post-election Angus-Reid poll suggested that 62 per cent Canadians were “upset” by the election of Trump—including at least 70 per cent of women and Canadians aged 18-35, the two groups that helped form Trudeau’s winning coalition in 2015. Canada is America’s primary trading partner, and while the pair do have shared interests—pipelines, for instance—there are significant philosophical differences between the two men. Trudeau cannot be seen as accepting President Trump, and will in fact feel pressured by his bread-and-butter constituents to publicly disavow him. He has already shown some prowess, too, at harnessing the tactics of the Internet: see, for instance, his subtweet of Trump and his executive order, criticizing it while retaining plausible deniability he wasn’t chastising the world’s most powerful man, but knowing full well what the social-media engine will do to the words.

Momentary flashes like these—tiny, seemingly insignificant and almost dismissible moments of resistance amid the strictures and intentionally bland standards of high-stakes diplomacy—are perfect antidotes to the officiousness of the formal event, allowing diplomacy to play out in two different venues: on the pure surface of the anodyne pressers and grip-and-grins, and in the roiling, uncontrollable, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ cauldron of social media.

U.S. President Donald Trump (R) extends his hand to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada during a meeting in the Oval Office at the White House on February 13, 2017 in Washington, D.C. This is the first time the two leaders are meeting at the White House. (Kevin Dietsch/Pool/Getty Images)

The idea that politicians may be more and more willing to pursue these kinds of winks and smoke signals—the kinds of flip, risky acts that could actually threaten acts of official diplomacy—would seem a preposterous idea. But then again, this is a preposterous time, where a president rose to power in large part because of his ability to dominate media narratives with a single tweet. Trump himself clearly senses that he’s able to harness moments of social strangeness to his advantage, for better or worse—at least they’re talking about him, or distracting from the serious policy issues of the day. And besides, leader tete-a-tetes have always been optics-first wars, anyway, where body language is a far richer vein than the careful, talking-point statements. But now those optics get imbued with additional meaning—and memeing—as they take on a second life on social media, which barrels on with such fury and glee that no one takes a moment to interpret whether or not it was intentional, and distracts people just enough to ignore what really matters. If the moment gets publicly dismissed by the leader in question, it loses some of its power, sure; but the fact-averse avalanche-rolling of the Internet’s memes have never cared much for such reality checks, anyway.

But what’s the upside? Other than the fact these little moments offer world leaders a rare opportunity at trying to sneak some kind of advantage in their complicated fight for their own countries’ interests in the face of the bullish leader of the world’s most powerful nation, they offer a way for world leaders to have it both ways—and that’s a rarity in a world of divisive, partisan politics. Dichotomies are how partisan politics work, after all: divide a complicated issue into two clear digestible sides of good versus evil. So the ability to try to please all involved is a tantalizing prospect. It won’t fool everyone—but it can be a hushed act of opposition.

And if you think there’s no power to social media and optics, look no further than to the U.S. president himself for proof that appearances may have never mattered more. After Politicoreported that press secretary Sean Spicer lost credibility within the administration because Melissa McCarthy—gasp, a woman—portrayed him on Saturday Night Live, the long-mediocre show decided to boldly cast women as U.S. attorney general Jeff Sessions and as Trump himself; another report suggested that the president’s media habits were so fulsome and so predictable that the networks that broadcast those shows hiked the rates for those looking to purchase a commercial spot hoping to catch the eye of the president. It is no surprise that America’s first reality-TV president would care about appearances. It should be no surprise, then, that other politicians might try to harness the same kind of thing in a wildly new world of modern diplomacy.

But ultimately, though, these are gestures. It won’t lead to a long-term win, and four or eight years of this tactic is not manageable; as Trump’s policies pile up, world leaders will have to draw more public lines in the sand. People will catch up to it, and—hopefully—stop being distracted by such circuses and bread. But as presidents and prime ministers come, one by one, to kiss the garish ring of the unpredictable leader of the free world without a road map, it just might offer a kind of temporary political salvation.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/how-memeable-moments-could-help-world-leaders-deal-with-their-trump-problem/feed/5The head of the Junos on #JunosSoMale, politics in music, and morehttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/arts/juno-awards-allan-reid-q-and-a/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/arts/juno-awards-allan-reid-q-and-a/#commentsFri, 10 Feb 2017 01:31:10 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=982109Allan Reid, the head of CARAS, on Canada's musical and political moment, and the criticisms that the Juno Awards are too male

Canada’s big 150th-anniversary birthday bash couldn’t have come at a better time for Canadian music, with so many of today’s biggest pop musicians proudly hailing from our home and native land. And that star power will be reflected at the 2017 Juno Awards, which will head to the country’s capital to fete our country’s best artists and wave our flag on April 2; Drake, The Weeknd and Shawn Mendes lead the pack with five nominations apiece.

But this week’s nominations announcement wasn’t all patriotism and good cheer. Last year, musicians like Grimes and Amy Millan criticized the Junos for failing to reflect gender equality, sparking the hashtag #JunosSoMale; this year, after the nominations were released, rock duo and Juno mainstays Tegan and Sara continued to press the message. “We must do better as it sends an outdated message to the next generation about whose art and voice and message is valuable,” they wrote in an open letter, noting that no women were nominated in eight of the categories, and another 12 only featured one female nominee.

Allan Reid, the president and CEO of the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (CARAS), sat down with Maclean’s to speak to this issue and more—from the role politics plays in music and awards shows, to whether it makes sense for some award categories to be judged, in part, by record sales and streaming numbers.

Q: Some of the world’s most prominent artists are Canadian, and the Junos obviously benefit from that. How do the Junos harness this moment and momentum?

A: I’m a guy who’s spent 30 years from the label side of things—I don’t think there’s ever been a more exciting time in music than what’s happening right now, and it’s also interesting too because of what’s happening politically in the world. Canada’s become this really great beacon. And music is so important to our cultural identity as well. I think they’re all very much linked together right now; we look to musicians to help guide us in a way, they’re our culture check. And it’s exciting—not just because of Drake and the Weeknd and Bieber, we’ve got these massive superstars, and it’s not since the 90s when Shania and Alanis and Celine and Sarah were dominating the charts have we seen this Canadian connection to the global charts, which is awesome. But it goes deeper than that. You look at someone like Grimes, or PartyNextDoor—there’s so many artists out there who are quietly building in their world, and they may not have massive breakthroughs but they’re happening all over the world.

Q: But the flip side of all this current energy is that it almost makes this a crucible period. Pop music is cyclical, and this Canadian pop moment won’t last forever. What are the Junos doing to build on this for when that isn’t the case?

A: I say this all the time: We’re not just an awards show. What people don’t know about CARAS as a whole, which is the academy, is we start with MusiCounts, our music education charity, which is a really important part of what we do. I mentioned yesterday on the 20th anniversary of MusiCounts—I ran it for three and a half years when I first joined this organization, and it really changed my life and what we do as an organization. I always say it’s the heart of the organization—putting instruments in school music programs—and this year will mark $10 million in instruments. That’s an essential part of our mandate: we’re not just building the stars of tomorrow, but also music in our schools and communities.

Last year, we started the Allan Slaight JUNO Master Class. At the time, I had been talking to all the music industry associations across the country, saying, what can we do to help your members, mainly small independent artists just trying to get heard. And they all said, ‘we need showcasing and networking opportunities, we need platforms for our artists.’ So we created this new program that brings three artists from across the country to Toronto for an intensive week, and it’s about peeling back the veil on the music industry—here’s agents, here’s managers, here’s lawyers, here’s how music supervision works, here’s how business works, and if you want to be successful, here’s what you need to plug into. And then we have the Juno Awards and then the final piece, the Canadian Hall of Fame.

So people don’t really look at us as all of that, they just look at the award show. But that’s all an important part to make sure that we’re helping actually not just promote and celebrate but also educate and develop those artists.

Q: But the Juno Awards themselves are a big, buzzy thing, and they’re certainly a big showcase for musical acts. So can you speak specifically to the idea of the Junos as a showcase, especially for lesser-known artists?

A: I used to manage an artist—after I left Universal I ran MapleMusic, an independent, and there was a guy named Royal Wood who I signed there, and when I left Maple, he asked me to take over his management. And he got nominated for songwriter of the year [in 2011]. His guarantees doubled after that nomination. He went from making a couple thousand bucks a night to instantly people going, well, if you’re nominated for that, then you must be good.

So there’s that piece. And in the lead-up—from the nominations to the award show—there are two months of hyperawareness of who those people are.

It is hard to do with the broadcast, when the broadcast always has the pressure for ratings and eyeballs: Does that music resonate, is the music what people want to hear, are they going stay tuned in if they don’t know what it is? But that is part of our obligation. But that’s why we’ve got Juno Week, bands playing through that, and we always have artists who may not get into the broadcast but are phenomenal at what they do, and we want to expose them to the industry.

Q: There’s also a representation piece in the showcasing. The Junos are a high-profile event, and they can serve as an inspiration for younger artists to say, ‘I can do that.’ And there’s an element, also, of people of colour, people of all genders, seeing what they can become, too. How much do the Junos integrate that idea into how they choose nominees and performers?

A: Aspiration is the premise of what the awards are all about: Will my peers recognize me? That’s a powerful tool to drive a lot of things. I don’t think most artists go into it ever doing that, most artists, they just need to create, and if they get recognized for it, then that’s a bonus. But that’s what we want to be, an inspiration for artists to say, ‘I want to be the best at what I do, and in this country, if the recognition the Junos, that’s what I want to get to.’

Tegan and Sara, at the 2016 Juno Awards.

Q: This all brings me to the controversy surrounding the Junos and lack of representation for women. What did you think when that controversy first cropped up last year?

A: So, yes, we went through this last year when Amy Millan sent that tweet out. And having been in this business a long time, I know a lot of people, so I just called Amy immediately, and kind of went, ‘What’s this about?’ She goes, ‘Ah, it’s kind of a joke, riffing off the Oscars thing.’ And it got a lot of traction. And it’s interesting, because again for CARAS, we don’t pick nominees, we represent what comes out that year.

As we say, we’re putting a mirror back to the music industry. And that’s what I think what Tegan and Sara’s whole point was: they’re very appreciative obviously, they’re a three-time nominee this year. But they want to bring a message to the music industry that they have the power to sign, find, promote, acknowledge all these artists, and that we have a diverse population in the country. The interesting thing is, I sort of go: ‘Who did we miss’? When I look at our list of nominees, and I see Alessia [Cara] with four, and we’re honouring Sarah [McLachlan] and Buffy [Sainte-Marie], and Ruth B’s there with three, and Grimes who was also part of last year’s [controversy] is now a three-time nominee.

There were eight categories where there was no female representation, and we’re working through this actually today. Producer and engineer are some of the key ones. We haven’t yet been able to delve into finding out where those sit now, but typically those two categories, last year we get 70 to 80 submissions, we get single-digits from females. So it speaks to the larger challenges in the industry, is that a career path that women are picking in this music industry. When you go to Nimbus in Vancouver and Metalworks studio here or Trebas Institute and look at those courses, the majority of those students are usually male. And there are definitely women there, but it’s highly a male-based course. So that again reflects on: do we have female producers who are at the top of their game to the same as the men are in producing these records that are having global success. For the most part, we don’t see that, not right now. That doesn’t mean there aren’t great women who are making great music, but when the committee vets those applications, they’re also trying to make sure that the best people get it, and it’s not gender-based. That’s one of the things at CARAS, we don’t base it on gender, or diversity, it’s about music and music only. And so those things aren’t really taken into account—I hope they’re not, by the judges, because that’s not what people should be based on. It should be about music.

Q: But what role can CARAS play in making sure gender equality is better reflected in the industry?

A: There’s an organization here called Women in Music. So I called them and said what can we do, how can we help? And then one of the first things I said to Amy was, ‘Are you a member of CARAS?’ You’re turning the spotlight on us but you’re not actually a member here, so if you want to help us here, have a voice and be part of the membership and join the dialogue that happens here. Same thing with Tegan and Sara, they’re not members. That’s the first place it starts with us at CARAS: please, if you want to have an impact on who the nominees are and who wins, vote. Become a member and have a say. And I think that’s an important part. But that also goes back to MusiCounts. We’re putting instruments in the hands of young women. Thousands of young girls are getting to play music in their schools because of this organization. And that comes back to what we were saying at the very beginning of what we do that people just don’t see.

Certainly, I’m all for the healthy dialogue of how can we help women find more roles in the industry, but they also have to have that desire of, ‘I want to be a producer, I want to be an engineer, and enrol in those schools and go forward with that.’

Q: Why do you think artists aren’t becoming CARAS members?

A: A lot of artists, they just don’t bother. They make their music, it’s an honour to be a nominee, but they don’t enroll. And it’s interesting, because it’s important to us—and we do a ton of outreach to the industry. A lot of them will join and they won’t renew the next year, and there is a cost to it, so there’s a barrier of entry for some of them. You need to be an engaged music industry person to be part of our membership, you’ve got to know about the business and who we are. But those people are also key for us in how we pick and create our category advisories, our judges.

Q: Earlier, you brought up the idea of the Junos being a mirror to the industry. But I’m having trouble reconciling that with the idea of also seeking to be a spotlight for lesser-known Canadian artists, or less-represented artists, to get them exposure. One seems very passive, but the other very active. Is that trying to have it both ways?

A: You know, when I think of us as a mirror there’s no question we as an organization want to celebrate the success of our artists. And I think it would be a disservice for us to say we don’t want to celebrate Drake, Weeknd, Alessia Cara, Shawn Mendes, Celine Dion—they deserve it.

It is a tightrope. And it’s hard to be all things to all people all the time. That’s why we welcome the feedback and that’s why when the Tegan and Sara thing came up today, I go, ‘okay, this is a chance for a conversation again, this is a chance to continue to push CARAS’s message out: we are inclusive, and we want to do what we can do to help promote and celebrate our artists, whether they be major artists or emerging artist or niche artist.‘

Q: The Junos used to have gendered categories for best artist, up until 2003. Would you consider going back to that?

A: I don’t think so. It’s not something people have come and said, ‘we need to have the male and female artists of the year again.’ I think we looked at it—this was before my time—and the board kind of went: it’s music. Gender shouldn’t be a determining factor, and nor should your ethnic background. It should be, do you make great music?

Q: Would it help with that representation piece?

It might, but equally you have a lot of people—very strong feminist people— going, we don’t want to be recognized as a woman, we want to be recognized amongst our peers as being the best we can possibly be. So that’s where we sided. We’ve got Alessia Cara, and Ruth B, and one of the members of the Strumbellas are in there in the Junos Fan Choice this year. Should that be female only? We don’t think so, it should be: let all musicians make music, and let it be judged simply on that merit.

The Weeknd performs at the 2016 Juno Awards at Scotiabank Saddledome on April 3, 2016 in Calgary, Canada. (George Pimentel/Getty Images)

Q: I want to shift gears a bit and talk about the caveats to our current Canadian pop moment—that is, while people like Drake, The Weeknd, Justin Bieber, Shawn Mendes and Alessia Cara have made it big, they’ve done that by signing to American labels. In both your position as the head of CARAS, and also as someone who’s been in the industry for 30 years, is that a problem?

A: They’re Canadian. That’s all that matters to us—doesn’t matter how they’re having that success, breaking out in a foreign market and coming back to Canada or breaking out of Canada and going to foreign markets, it’s not really that important. Obviously, we love to see Canadian artists who have Canadian agents and sign to a label here and have Canadian managers, because that helps to build the infrastructure of our whole network. Like when Celine [Dion] was signed years ago by Sony Canada, that revenue that those records made around the world came back to Sony Canada and they were able to reinvest that back in. But then I look at someone like Drake and even though he’s signed to a U.S. label, he’s created OVO, he’s employing people, and the spill-off of that is amazing. They’ve got a beautiful studio here, a network of producers, and they’re now bringing artists from around the world here to record. It’s a super exciting time.

It’s certainly, from the label world, it’s always hard when an artist signs to a U.S. label, but there are some times where it makes sense. When you sign to a label, you’re signing with somebody—somebody who’s passionate about your music. Your A&R guy needs to champion your music and your vision through the company. And if that person is in the U.K. or Australia or Canada or wherever, that’s a really important part of your career. Same with your manager, and we’ve got some of the best managers in the world here.

Q: What then would you say is one of the biggest challenges facing the Canadian music industry specifically that people aren’t maybe talking about?

A: When we talk about the music industry we talk about record labels and not just what’s going on as a whole. The digital disruption that happened was devastating for the labels, was devastating for artists. What we often forget about is how are these people making a living. And it’s easy to say we’ll go tour, there’s no money in record sales anymore, go tour. That’s an easy thing to say. Go on a bus or a van with these bands who have to travel eight, 10 hours between shows—it’s a grind. It’s a tough life. It’s tough on relationships. It’s tough to have a family. That’s a tough road to hoe out there. So the industry’s gone through this decline in record sales which not only hurt the labels and cause contraction, it’s also hurt the investment dollars available to artists. Artists are forced to do a lot more on their own. The artist development money isn’t as great as it used to be. If a label doesn’t have more rights—if they’re just looking at their return on investment—they now have a smaller pie to work from, so that means if my goal is to sell 10,000 units, then I can’t invest a million dollars in you. The dollars don’t work. So I need to have a portion of your publishing or I need to be a part of your touring rights. I need to build your brand. I need to be involved with other things. So the business has become more complicated that way for artists and managers to navigate.

The live music scene is interesting too. There’s a lot of talk right now about the closure of these venues in Toronto. Vancouver went through this years ago in downtown Vancouver exploding the condo market and all these legendary rooms just disappeared. And that’s a real concern. I don’t know if we’re quite there yet in Toronto—we’ve got some great music venues here. But supporting live music is also another key thing.

Q: You brought up the idea of streaming, and what’s interesting is that one could make the argument that the big Canadian stars are leading a lot of the digital disruption right now: Drake is signing exclusive deals with Apple Music, and he and The Weeknd are releasing longer albums arguably to maximize their per-song streaming revenues. But the thing that people don’t think about is that yes, these guys are trying new things to try to make it for themselves—but the vast majority of artists aren’t at that level. So what can the ’99 per cent’ of artists do in a world where even these top-flight musicians are still trying to figure it out?

A: The one good thing that finally seems to be coming out is that mass streaming is now here, and the labels are sort of seeing a bit of rebound. Which is great because that will again allow for further investment. So there is there’s a silver lining here. We’ve all got phones now that allow you to stream whatever you want whenever you want. But as you said, you know, the compensation by the creators is not there, especially for those emerging level of artists because it’s tough to make a living. It’s not just about the streaming revenue, it’s about everything you can do. And that’s not easy. It’s not easy when MusicCanada brings out Miranda Mulholland, a talented violin player with the Great Lake Swimmers, who does very well as an artist, and says she’s struggling to pay her rent, saying this is the reality of the music industry for a lot of us.

Q: You spoke before about the Junos not being able to be everything to everyone. And the Grammys, for instance, certainly have more categories. Is it something of a fool’s game to even try to to reflect the music of a country as geographically big and culturally diverse as Canada?

A: Well no, I think it’s important to try. Can we capture everybody? No: it is a huge country, and a diverse country. But it’s also why we’re also a very open organization. If all of a sudden there was a new form of music that came along, we create a new category that covers this. So constantly we’re looking at who we’re trying to serve in the industry, and do we have it all covered.

But I think it’s not a fool’s game. And it’s never going to be perfect; it’s an award show. But I think the Junos really do play an important part in helping promote our artists and our culture.

Q: Would losing the streaming-and-sales element in the judging help give jurors more choice in promoting more kinds of artists?

A: No, they don’t come into every category. The majority categories are not based on sales.

Q: But most of the big categories, the ones that people talk about, are based on sales figures.

A: Absolutely. But sales consumption of music is probably the biggest indicator of are you being listened to. And to take that out would be a disservice to the people who are actually having success, and we want to celebrate that success. So it’s one of the key indicators that we look at along with the voting of our members and also what artists are doing online to build their awareness.

Q: These days, it feels like awards shows are becoming emotional clearinghouses for politics. And you said, right when we started this conversation, that Canada has an interesting place in global politics for becoming a kind of beacon. Is that something you’re trying to embrace and advocate for, with the awards show in Ottawa for Canada’s sesquicentennial?

A: I was in Ottawa doing an event last week, and the political climate of the U.S. is on everyone’s mind, and how it’s going to affect us. And our artists have a megaphone to use. And not just for that, but just look at what Gord Downie did for Indigenous people in Kingston—that was a moment that 12 million people watched on a broadcast. And to use that platform to say we have a problem, and we need to fix it—that started something. That to me is amazing that music can help change things, and it always has. I think America is going to go to through that with what’s going on now, and music is going to be at the forefront of that.

But in Ottawa, when I was there, the conversation was: I’m so proud to be Canadian right now, I’m so glad of the pointed difference we represent. I think our artists recognize that, and not just about America, but who we are in the world, and how great our country is. Sure, we’ve got flaws. But this is a great place to live.

So it’s not our mandate, but our mandate is to give our artists the platform to express themselves to as large an audience as we possibly can.

Q: So will this year’s Junos be intentional about sending a political message?

A: No, I don’t think so. That’s not our message. We don’t have a political message. Ours is to say, these are amazing artists and they have opinions and here’s a platform. Whether that be a simple love song or a protest song, if it captures the imagination of the Canadian people, we want to honour it and celebrate it.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/arts/juno-awards-allan-reid-q-and-a/feed/3The most political Super Bowl of all time doesn’t have to behttp://www.macleans.ca/sports/the-most-political-super-bowl-of-all-time-doesnt-have-to-be/
http://www.macleans.ca/sports/the-most-political-super-bowl-of-all-time-doesnt-have-to-be/#commentsSat, 04 Feb 2017 05:23:38 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=979545The New England Patriots head to the Super Bowl with the spectre of Trump hanging overhead. But it's okay to turn off your political brain for the big game.

“[Politics] is probably most like football,” former president Barack Obama once told Jerry Seinfeld. “A lot of players. A lot of specialization. A lot of hitting. A lot of attrition. But then every once in awhile, you’ll see an opening, you hit the line, you get one yard, you try a play, you get sacked, now it’s like, third and 15… you have to punt a lot. But every once in awhile, you see a hole, and then there’s open field.”

But what happens when football becomes an actual stand-in for politics?

Super Bowl LI—America’s 51st orgy of naked patriotism and loosely shrouded capitalism compressed into a single smash-mouth day of simplistic symbols—is, barring presidential executive order, set to take place on Sunday. It will feature the Atlanta Falcons, whose high-flying offence has led them to just their second championship appearance in their five-decade history as they play the Oscar-catnip role of underdog. It will also feature the New England Patriots, who have appeared in seven Super Bowls since 2002: a team widely regarded by their supporters as earth-walking demigods, and by non-Patriots fans as a gangrenous infection on the game.

Whether or not that sneering is justified, or if it’s merely sour grapes over the objective truth of the franchise’s dynastic run, will be debated by talking jock heads to infinity, or until they warp into whatever molten hateful thing Skip Bayless is. But it’s of no matter here, because the bigger cloud that follows the Patriots into the Super Bowl is how the team’s most prominent members have aligned themselves so clearly with controversial U.S. President Donald Trump.

Svengali coach Bill Belichick, mordant and phlegmatic in his hoodie uniform, was revealed to have hugged and kissed the current president (by a source no less primary yet uncertain than Trump himself); Trump also revealed, on the campaign trail, that Belichick had sent him a letter slamming the “slanted media” and praising his “amazing” leadership.

The robotically great quarterback Tom Brady, gifted with the ability to suck the air from the room as quickly as he can from a football, placed a “Make America Great Again” hat prominently in his locker during a media scrum and said it “would be great” if Trump were president. He didn’t do himself any favours with his churlish comments on Super Bowl press day, in response to a question about protests to Trump’s immigration ban: “What’s going on in the world? I haven’t paid much attention. I’m just a positive person.”

The pair’s quasi-queasy support, plus owner Robert Kraft’s friendship with the president, all constitutes the most open rooting from inside the sports world for a divisive president whose actions have already inspired worldwide protests, sanctions from federal judges, a weakly attended inauguration, diplomatic crises, and what some polls suggest to be the lowest popularity numbers of the modern presidency. It’s spurred publications like New York Magazine, Slate and The Root to suggest cheering for the Falcons and against the Patriots, as they’re “Trump’s team.” The Super Bowl’s players, from the voluble Martellus Bennett to the Muslim Mohamed Sanu, spent press day dealing less with Xs and Os and more with issues of migrant crossings and partisan rows. And so it was that politics abruptly became a stand-in, rather than mere metaphor, for politics.

But no matter how easy it would be to do so, the Super Bowl cannot be dominated by the political narrative.

Sure, it would be easy—given how much this partisan narrative has dominated the Super Bowl conversation, and how much fuel Trump, the media, Belichick and Brady have added to the fire—to believe that rooting against the Patriots is a political act, that it qualifies as an act of resistance for those who oppose Trump.

But that allows sports, useful in some ways but futile in more, to sub in for political discourse. And when it comes to politics, sports comes up deeply wanting. Yes, many actions are political—from the belief systems you express clearly in your votes to the personal, daily choices you make that form those beliefs. But not everything that is political is necessarily useful. Sports fans need not expect their athletes to think the way they do—because even if they did, how would that really alter the illogic of which team’s laundry you would rather pay $150 to wear?

After all, the practice of sports fandom is an extremist worst-case microcosm of our current political discourse. Being a fan of a sport, with its clean lines and the simple mathematical binaries of winning or losing, means never having to step outside your echo-chamber, interrogating your beliefs, or compromising your values. You are rewarded for being fervent about your tribe. There is no room for centrism, for seeing the other side, for questions of why you are a fan of a team—there’s only room for the inarguable appeals to emotion that fuel this voracious, frothing, irrational fandom. For the sake of us all, the way we talk about sports needs to remain separate from how we talk about politics.

The Super Bowl also offers us a reminder that it’s okay for things to not be political, that it doesn’t represent a personal failure to not always be up for a fight. To ignore the political here isn’t to eliminate the issue, or to say it doesn’t matter. It’s to clear the way so that the political choices that do matter, that do boil furiously and demand our attention, get the attention it deserves. Making the Super Bowl partisan only makes it harder to see the forest from the trees, to note the problems that really matter. For those who oppose him, Trump’s policies matter far more than his football friendships.

Certainly, that’s something of a false dichotomy—caring about banalities doesn’t automatically preclude you from caring about policy. But when everything is political, it makes it harder to target the things that really matter—and people do, ultimately, have a limited psychic bandwidth for political issues. There is an acceptable solace to find in the things that don’t need to be political—and hey, maybe the place to start is the title game of a multibillion-dollar sports league that asks its fans to forget that its players are killing each other in front of you for entertainment.

So go ahead: crack that branded beer, eat too much chili, buy a GoDaddy website, and don’t think too much about the political implications of the Super Bowl. Revel in your preferred secular rituals at the foot of first-world capitalism’s cathedral without much concern for the real world. For a night, let the cognitive dissonance that has long lubricated the NFL’s blood-spattered money press hum louder than your brain working out of what Trump means for the Super Bowl.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/sports/the-most-political-super-bowl-of-all-time-doesnt-have-to-be/feed/2Looking up to leadership: Do you have to be tall to be U.S. president?http://www.macleans.ca/politics/washington/looking-up-to-leadership-do-you-have-to-be-tall-to-be-u-s-president/
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/washington/looking-up-to-leadership-do-you-have-to-be-tall-to-be-u-s-president/#respondFri, 20 Jan 2017 23:13:15 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=974343It's good to be tall, even in U.S. politics, as a comparison of presidential height to the average height of the American male reveals

Here’s a tall tale that is no lie: Having height on your side is a boon in life. Multiple studies have concluded that being taller leads to higher wages, to the tune of as much as a 1.8-per-cent increase annually for every inch over the average height, according to a Journal of Human Capital study. A 1995 story in the Economist found that 90 per cent of Fortune 500 CEOs were of above average height, while less than 3 per cent stood below 5 foot 7. In the Economics & Human Biology journal, a study of tall German workers found that the stature-gifted were also happier, in general. It can be an obstacle in dating: the preferred height difference between men and women in relationships is for the man to be taller by six inches. And it can help even in health: every 2.5 inches of height meant a 13.5 per cent lower likelihood of coronary artery disease, according to findings in the New England Journal of Medicine. (Disclosure: This author is very pleased to be 6’2”.)

Even the rarified reaches of the American presidency isn’t immune to that kind of height-based bias; it is a fascination, even in the political field. In fact, one of the most-searched questions on Google ahead of Donald Trump’s inauguration was just that: “How tall is Donald Trump?” The answer: 6’2”, one inch taller than his predecessor, Barack Obama. (However, as with everything to do with a president known for playing fast and loose with the facts, there is controversy on this; his medical report, released during the campaign, listed him at 6’3”—a full inch taller than the height on his driver’s license.)

To see just how much height matters with the presidency, we compared the listed heights of all of America’s presidents to the average height of American men. (Click the graphic below to expand.) And indeed, the leader of the United States is very often a leader in U.S. stature, starting from the very beginning, when George Washington towered over his constituents. Of America’s 45 presidents, only six have been of below-average height; the last one was Jimmy Carter, elected 40 years ago, and the shortest was James Madison, the country’s fourth president, who clocked in at 5’4”.

So in a time of political uncertainty, here’s a piece of advice for Americans: Stand tall. You never know where it’ll take you.

Sources: Our World In Data; Wikipedia. This image has been corrected to amend a numerical error in the Y axis.

A Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) sign is seen outside of a branch in Ottawa. (Chris Wattie/Reuters)

These days, deep learning is all the rage. Tech’s biggest players, from Intel to Amazon, are betting big on the artificial intelligence technique modelled after the instincts of the human brain, with its ability to read patterns, sense rules, and make the best decision accordingly. Not long ago, Google spent more than $400 million to buy industry-leading startup DeepMind, and scored a major tech and marketing coup when the computer AlphaGo defeated grandmaster Lee Sedol at the possibility-lush game of Go—an achievement hundreds of times more complex than when Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov at chess. Deep learning is being touted as a way forward for climate science, medicine and genomics; it’s already embedded in the way you search for something online, when you Google image search for, say, “cat,” and feline photos come up as a result of AI learning of what “cat” means.

But it wasn’t always the popular kid in the block. In its early days in the 1980s, deep learning’s mostly Canadian pioneers—in particular, the trio of Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and Yann LeCun, who worked largely out of an institute in Toronto—were dismissed as foolish apostates. “At the time, it didn’t solve big practical AI problems, it didn’t replace the existing technology,” said Hinton, considered the godfather of deep learning, in a 2016 interview with Maclean’s. But when computing power started to advance at an incredible rate, deep learning’s potential for AI was unlocked, turning huge piles of data into artificial intelligence that could, effectively, learn like our brain.

Canada, though, hasn’t enjoyed much benefit for being an early adopter on the forefront of this technology. American companies have mostly picked the cupboard clean: Hinton now works with Google, LeCun leads Facebook’s AI research lab, and Bengio is an adviser with IBM, whose work out of the University of Montreal has earned significant funding from Google and beyond. Even Hinton has acknowledged this is cause for concern, in a recent Globe and Mail commentary written with other leading deep-learning experts: “There is one solution that will help keep the best minds in Canada, solve the current and future talent gap for domestic businesses, lure investment from foreign data-rich companies, and ensure Canada leads future AI breakthroughs: We must build a world-leading AI Institute in Toronto.”

So it’s not insignificant that the Royal Bank of Canada’s Research in Deep Learning division—still shiny from its launch just seven months ago—has acquired the services of a big name in the field, adding Richard Sutton to its roster. Sutton wrote the book on the field of reinforcement learning, a technique which allows AI to teach itself what the best actions are using a reward-punishment system of its own, an area of deep learning that played a role in the success of DeepMind’s AlphaGo project. He will advise the group, currently based out of the University of Toronto, and also collaborate with RBC’s second AI research lab, which will be in Edmonton.

“A lot of the development in deep learning came out of Canadian universities, yet the industry wasn’t positioned well enough to capitalize on that innovation, so we’ve lost a lot of people to south of the border,” said Foteini Agrafioti, who leads RBC’s deep-learning division. “That’s something we feel, as the biggest company in the country, we have the responsibility to invest in.”

While Sutton is certainly not a household name, he is a major figure in deep learning, and a significant addition for a Canadian company nonetheless. Without a central hub for academics to branch out on their work in Canada, deep learning’s southbound pioneers served as pied pipers, bringing their students with them, creating a brain drain.

Banking, too, seems to have plenty to offer deep-learning experts—in particular, rich historical data sets from decades of business. “The backbone of machine learning is data sets, and without that you’re really handcuffed. The bank has really interesting data sets from decades of market data that can be used to solve open problems right now,” says Agrafioti. Banking also offers some tantalizing practical applications for deep-learning innovators, too; of the three possibilities listed by Agrafioti—personalized AI-driven customer service, real-time fraud prevention and risk management—it’s the last one that might appeal most to those interested in industry disruption. Deep learning’s use of patterns to predict future activity appears to have tremendous potential for stock brokers, investment bankers, and asset managers—to assist them, at least for now. (For the record, Agrafioti demurs about the potential automation of those positions, rightly noting that there is no industry consensus on whether AI can ever truly become as or more powerful than the human brain.)

It is, however, unclear if Canada’s banks—collectively the country’s largest companies—could reverse the tide of expertise migrating southward on their own. While the price tag of RBC’s investment in this lab is unclear, beyond Agrafioti’s cited cost of “tens of millions of dollars over the coming years,” Canada’s banks are unlikely to be able to match the dollar figures splashed around by companies like Tesla, which invested US$1 billion into Open AI in 2015. Canada’s Big Six banks themselves are less likely to feel the need to innovate, insulated as they are against the competitive agitation of fintech companies by their market position and regulatory bulwarks, and cognizant that Canada’s venture capitalism industry—usually the fuel for fintech—is far less fulsome than America’s. For these comfortable behemoth banks, the innovation stakes aren’t as high, a fact that Agrafioti acknowledges: “Our rate of adoption is, of course, not as fast as some tech companies.”

Still, RBC deserves credit for at least pushing to develop more homegrown research. Scotiabank, CIBC, TD Canada Trust and Bank of Montreal were not able to respond at press time to requests for details about their own research into deep learning. (Scotiabank did, however, start a “digital factory” in 2015, which professed to partner with fintech startups to develop new technologies, and gifted the University of Toronto with $1.75 million to study “disruptive technologies,” while several big-bank CEOs acknowledged that AI needed to be harnessed within the industry at a recent conference.)

But will it be enough to reverse the AI brain drain on its own? Surely not. The lure of money, vast data sets, and powerful computing in Silicon Valley remains a powerful pull for those at the peak of their profession. But if Canadian companies can learn anything from deep learning, it’s to take lessons from the many patterns of the past—struggles to innovate, and an inability to keep our best talent here—and project the right way forward in the future. And where better to start, than with the large data sets at the fingertips of our powerful banks?

The marble statue of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato stands in front of the Athens Academy, as the Greek flag flies in Athens on Tuesday June 5, 2012. (AP Photo/Dimitri Messinis)

The ancient Greek philosopher Plato, if memory serves from my university days as a student of journalism and philosophy—or as I sometimes call it, gaining a degree in dinner parties—is perhaps best known for his thinking about plates of the tectonic variety.

Well, that’s not exactly right, even if that was a helpful mnemonic device for exams from yesteryear. Plato’s allegory of the cave, from an imagined dialogue in The Republic, isn’t a lesson in geology; it’s a metaphor for seeing past falsehoods and efforts to free the mind and find a higher truth. In an argument between the character Socrates and a friend, Plato imagines an underground cave, where men who have been imprisoned all their life stare at a wall where the shadows of puppets dance against the light of a fire behind them. For these men, those puppets are the only reality they know. But one man is freed and, now able to look, has his eyes scalded by the shadow-casting fire, is stunned by the new realities, and then scrambles out of the cave until he reaches the ultimate reality: a sun that was impossible to fathom when he was seated peaceably facing a cave wall. This freed man is the philosopher, Plato posits: the man who awakens and then burns to find the truth.

That’s an image worth considering amid the outrage generated by a news story from England that has rankled many all around the world—especially on the political right—and re-energized those railing against the reliable bogeyman of rising political correctness. Earlier this week, the Telegraph reported that the student union of University of London’s school of Oriental and African studies college demanded that philosophers like Plato, René Descartes and Immanuel Kant be “removed from the syllabus because they are white” in a mandate that sought to “decolonize” the SOAS.

How infuriating! Kids these days—the easiest three-word phrase to rail against—how dare they ask for the outright banning of these sacred cows of Western thought? Let us mock them for being so triggered! Political correctness has gone too far! Sad!

These wouldn’t be unreasonable responses, perhaps, if the story were premised in truth.

An even cursory look at the cited document from the SOAS student union shows that they only sought to “make sure that the majority of the philosophers on our courses are from the Global South or [its] diaspora,” which hardly counts as a hardline ban of anyone of any race. And while they added that the caveat that “if white philosophers are required … teach their work from a critical standpoint, for example, acknowledging the colonial context in which so called ‘Enlightenment’ philosophers wrote within,” it’s important to note that no philosopher—Kant, Descartes, Plato, or anyone else—is named even once.

It can only be presumed that the Telegraph inserted those names as philosophers they felt fit that description—white, and from the 18th century Enlightenment period—and as thinkers whose potential removal would shake the outrage tree until it bore fruit. (Maybe no one told the writer that Plato, a Greek man who died in 348 BCE, does not quite fit the definition of “white philosophers from the Enlightenment period.”) Let us also acknowledge that criticizing a school devoted to Asian and African studies for wanting to learn more from Asian and African thinkers is a little bit like criticizing math school students for demanding to know more about that Archimedes guy.

The facts haven’t simmered the outrage, nor has it stopped academics from rejecting these efforts to read our time into ancient texts using the talking points of, well, our time. “There is a real danger [that] political correctness is getting out of control,” said Sir Anthony Seldon, vice-chancellor of Buckingham University, because of course he did. “We need to understand the world as it was and not to rewrite history as some might like it to have been.” Or this lay-up of a line, from Sir Roger Scruton, where you can almost hear the haughty sniff at the end of the sentence: “If they think there is a colonial context from which Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason arose, I would like to hear it.” No wonder the story has, in recent days, become catnip for such publications as Breitbart and The Rebel, but also for more mainstream media outlets, like the Independent and the National Post here in Canada. Everyone loves a story that feeds what we already know, even if it’s not rooted in fact.

The whole thing is a missed opportunity: A missed opportunity for academics to give the story little credence and prove that philosophy was above the fray of the overly personal bickering that has infected the political climate. A missed opportunity from reporters to find out from the angriest of these academics why they think that teaching more diverse voices means teaching Western European voices less. (In fact, that’s the kind of defensive mentality—that addition must mean subtraction—that’s awful familiar from the most blinkered responses to the Black Lives Matter movement, or to any urge for equality that touches a frayed nerve.) Hell, it was even an opportunity to simply acknowledge that philosophers owe a lot to non-white thinkers. It would be hard, for instance, to imagine a legacy for Aristotle without the efforts of the Islamic scholar Averroes, whose work then inspired Thomas Aquinas. Plato’s legacy was continued and refined by Plotinus, who was born in Egypt. St. Augustine, best known for his Confessions, was an Algerian; some of Voltaire’s political writings were influenced by what he saw in China. (Or, at least, there was room for a conversation about how projecting race onto ancient times is a sticky wicket in general.)

Even if we were to take the story at its face value—that indeed, philosophy students from the University of London, rather than a specialized school like SOAS, wanted to learn more about philosophers outside of the Western canon and sought a critical take on hoary canonical icons. How is that so wrong? How could students taking an active and expansive interest in what they’re being taught scare teachers, when sparking thoughtful considerations like that is the very goal of education? Wanting to learn more about historical contexts and seeking to think critically and contextually about what they’re studying aren’t signs of a dismissible “snowflake” student. It’s actually the sign of a good one.

But mostly, the whole philosophy fracas is a depressing vision. How sad that academics—the high-minded thinkers who think they have themselves escaped the cave—thought defending philosophy meant parroting easy outrage and succumbing to overly simplistic falsehoods. How tragic that teachers appeared to so quickly abandon their students for the most bargain-bin of straw men. And that may be the saddest thing of all: if falsehoods and polarized politics and manufactured outrage and the leaping to simple fallacies can infect philosophy’s lofty rafters, then what hope do the rest of us have?

After all, if those philosophers had indeed re-read Plato, they would have known better. The characters in the imagined conversations in The Republic are more than mere fools built up to be knocked down. They challenge Socrates’ proofs, urge him on, and make them better. They wield ideas, not personal attacks. They are rhetorical dance partners, not useful idiots. Socrates, the book’s Platonic mouthpiece, even acknowledges that he is willing to be convinced otherwise on various points. Philosophy of the sort in The Republic is, in short, not a project of balkanization, where ideas are heroic or villainous. It’s a dialogue, the kind we need more of, from all of us—but especially our philosophers.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/how-a-spat-over-pc-culture-in-philosophy-betrayed-philosophy-itself/feed/5Maclean’s picks the best albums and songs of 2016http://www.macleans.ca/culture/arts/macleans-picks-the-best-albums-and-songs-of-2016/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/arts/macleans-picks-the-best-albums-and-songs-of-2016/#respondMon, 19 Dec 2016 16:33:06 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=963243Maclean’s music critics name their favourite albums of 2016 and highlight the Canadian artists that mattered this year

(l-r) Consequence, Q-Tip and Jarobi White of musical guest A Tribe Called Quest, and Busta Rhymes perform on Saturday Night Live on November 12, 2016. (Will Heath/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank/Getty Images)

Every year, Maclean’s picks the best in arts and culture. To read more of our selections of what shone in music, television, movies, and books in 2016—as well as our annual Missed It List, capturing the items that went under the radar—go here.

BEST OF 2016:Adrian Lee gives his unranked list of the ten best albums of the year—and what solace we can find in them, in a year of disquiet.

What a time, Drake and Future exulted just one year ago, to be alive. What a difference a year makes. 2016 has brought the deaths of some of our most beloved figures and of innocents around the world, the kinds of tragedies that mark the churn of time but that have weighed heavy this year. And when a man who selectively redefines the meaning of truth, deploys racist and sexist rhetoric, scrambles the structures of basic decency, remains largely silent in the face of his supporters’ vitriol, and boasts of sexual assault becomes picked to lead the free world, it’s fair to feel like your equilibrium is off—like this is an alternate reality where the details are close to ours but are unnervingly just a little bit off.

So it’s no surprise that the music that resonated most in 2016, in some small way, offered us some lessons in how to go on in the face of uncertainty. Art is, after all, a reminder of the best of our lives, an assurance that there can be solace in beauty. It’s the “lifted, rough-tongued bell” that the poet Philip Larkin that draws you to the window and reminds you of who you are. And these lessons are useful moving ahead; for as often as people long for 2016 to be over, it’s not as if 2017 will offer a break in the forward progress of time.

There were the albums that burned and raved at close of day, that refused to go gentle into that good night. Kaytranada’s 99.9% was an ecstatic revelation, with the Polaris Prize-winning Canadian DJ proving himself to be a maestro in how he deploys both his trademark drums and his big-name guest artists, all contributing hooks and verses in the service of an album that turned heads everywhere I played it in the heat of a muggy summer. On Coloring Book, Chance The Rapper rejoices in his faith, mixing his lyrical somersaults with his soulful hard-hewn singing voice to produce as deeply Christian an album as you can put out without being marginalized in the mainstream. It’s an antidote for the year, partly an almost-Pollyanna call to remain joyful (“All you need is happy thoughts”), partly a rejection of smiling ignorantly in the face of the darkness (mourning how seasonal heat brings death tolls in Chicago on “Summer Friends”) as he urges us to go on (the swaggering “No Problem,” the gleeful “Mixtape”) empowered by faith (“Blessings”). (His trademark yawp might have been the sound of the year.) Anderson .Paak’sMalibu is a tour-de-force in exuberance, the product of a hustling artist rewarded by a Dr. Dre spotlight and taking full advantage of it with a forward-facing sun-dappled funk. Mixing the uplift of gospel and the urgent, groovy call of the dance floor, Paak’s versatile voice—ranging from gentle cooing to smoke-inhaled croak to rootsy croon to rat-a-tat rapping—makes this his own kind of strutting, off-kilter soul.

Other albums taught us about how to love—as sure a way forward as there can be in a time of despair. Carly Rae Jepsen’sB-Sides were far more than scrap-heap spinoffs; in eight songs, it’s a relationship in miniature, from the fire-blast feelings at first blush, to the hesitancy of giving oneself fully, to the regrets and mistakes, to the baleful notes of final goodbyes. (Fever, a Celine Dion-channelling, bike-stealing torch song that revels in the stupid things we do when we’re dumb in love, is one of my favourite songs of the year.) WithLemonade, Beyonce showed us that even the world’s most famous, most powerful people can feel heartbreak, wrap themselves to pettinesses, allow themselves vengeance, and agree to uncomfortable compromises; it taught us how we can forgive and move on while remaining forces of nature; it showed us that the personal can be deeply political; heck, it even showed us that musicians can make movies. And Rihanna’s ANTI, from its first song to the last, is a clear-eyed reflection of modern relationships in the Tinder age. These days, after all, admitting that you love too deeply or too soon is a sin; the fear of getting hurt is too great a risk, and so we encase our hearts in stone, to make us immune to hurt—and, circularly, love. In ANTI, threaded through with galloping verve, we see cracks appear in Rihanna’s swaggering carapace. It begs us to ask: if pop music’s most iconic ice queen can let herself feel, as she does in the raw, voice-cracking “Higher,” who are we to not allow ourselves to be open to the possibility of love? And after all, what is love without a leap, a gamble, the chance of losing everything deemed to be worth it? Suffocating your heart to protect yourself, ANTI teaches us, is no way to live. Love is worth the work, work, work, work, work.

Then there are the artists whose personal albums reflect their own struggle, the musicians whose stories present us a way forward. Country crooner Margo Price’s Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, a remarkable debut for the long-gigging, hard-living 33-year-old from Nashville, is as scrappy as Price is. Her goals are straightforward (“I want to buy back the farm/and bring my mama home some wine”); her personal story gripping (a weekend in jail, a child who died in infancy, an affair with a married man). In one of the few genres left where authenticity issues remain an ongoing concern, the resilient Price’s hardscrabble story, sung in her world-weary voice and set to satisfying honky-tonk, Midwest Farmer’s Daughter is poetry, not Loretta Lynn pastiche. Isaiah Rashad, arguably the second-most talented rapper on Kendrick Lamar’s TDE label, was nearly swallowed alive by addiction after his incredible EP Cilvia Demo. On his debut album The Sun’s Tirade, Rashad refuses to give in, diving into his own anxieties not for our sake but his, giving his stresses voice so he can banish them. The Chattanooga native’s affection for baleful Southern slurring is exemplified by the Outkast-invoking “Stuck In The Mud”, a title that’s both euphemistic (the spinning of one’s wheels) and literal (being dragged down by drugs). And after years of album-worthy mixtapes, Baton Rouge rapper-crooner Kevin Gates’s first true album, Islah—named after his daughter—is some of the most tender gangsta rap in recent memory. For one of the most honest rappers in the game—and one of the strangest, too—a first album where he raps or sings nearly every verse and hook is a tremendous bet on himself that pays off. Maybe we can’t learn much specifically from his own life story (which includes admissions of dating a cousin, among other oddities), but we can take something away from his confidence, and his songs’ unvarnished moments of earnest self-discovery.

But mostly, another year of phenomenal music is a reminder unto itself of how we can go on. It’s the lesson that A Tribe Called Quest’s We Got It From Here…Thank U 4 Your Service leaves us with. The mere fact that the influential, effervescent hip-hop group put out an album after 18 years of silence is incredible enough. The fact that it’s fresh and sparkles with Q-Tip and Phife Dawg’s legendary chemistry is a blessing. The fact that it came after rapper Phife Dawg’s untimely death by diabetes, such that the album sounds like a wake where the guest of honour is delivering bars from inside the coffin, is a miracle. And its very existence—and its general excellence—is the kind of impossible dream fulfilment that rewards our staying alive and our staying strong.

Kaytranada performs on Day 1 of Lovebox festival taking place at Victoria park on July 17, 2015 in London, United Kingdom. (Joseph Okpako/Redferns/Getty Images)

BEST OF 2016 IN CANADIAN MUSIC:In another year that has affirmed Canadian music as some of the best in the world, Michael Barclay gives his list of the top 10 Canadian records of the year.

1. Kaytranada – 99.9%. The year’s weirdest success story also spawned the best record: 23-year-old bedroom-dwelling Haitian-Montrealer known for SoundCloud remixes pulls in up-and-coming international collaborators (Anderson .Paak, AlunaGeorge), almost-forgotten R&B and hip-hop artists (Craig David, Phonte), and new Toronto beatmakers (BadBadNotGood, River Tiber) and ends up creating the straight-up funkiest record to come out of Canada—perhaps ever, winning the Polaris Music Prize in the process. It draws from old school hip-hop, jazz fusion, Brazilian beats, Donna Summer disco, house music, DJ Shadow deconstruction, and anything else that sounds fantastic on the dance floor. Drake may have dominated the charts and the headlines, but Kaytranada made the infinitely superior—and much more fun—record.

2. Veda Hille – Love Waves. The Vancouver art-pop songwriter writes melodies that could sell a musical (which she’s done, frequently, to greatacclaim), has the gall and the talent to rewrite and (gasp) improve her favourite songs by David Bowie and Brian Eno, employs many of Vancouver’s finest players, pens a plaintive ode to her young boy and reimagines the ordeal of Orpheus and Eurydice—in German, no less. Oh, and she’s wickedly funny when she wants to be. There’s no end to her insatiable curiosity—or her talent.

3. Leonard Cohen – You Want It Darker. Frankly, Leonard, I’m not sure we did want it darker; 2016 turned out bleaker than we could ever have imagined (and it’s not over yet). It was enough that Cohen left us with one final masterpiece before he died, but his death proved to be a gift that gave us reason to re-examine his entire catalogue in a year when we were grasping for a glimpse of any light through the cracks.

4. The Tragically Hip – Man Machine Poem. Gord Downie was a newsmaker of the year for staring down death and delivering a series of triumphs, but least discussed among them was the fact that the newest Tragically Hip album was alone a reason to celebrate. Written and recorded before Downie’s diagnosis, and co-produced by Broken Social Scene’s Kevin Drew, it was a reinvention that could well have turned over a new leaf in the legendary band’s catalogue—and still might. Downie claims it’s not the last we’ll hear from them.

5. Badbadnotgood – IV. Space-age bachelor pad music from a jazz band steeped in hip-hop and joined by guest singers, including Future Islands’ Sam Herring, Chicago MC Mick Jenkins and Toronto newcomer Charlotte Day Wilson (Kaytranada and Colin Stetson stop by as well). This band gets better with each record, and the permanent addition of saxophonist Leland Whittly pushes them even further.

6. Black Mountain – IV. If any rock record in the history of this country has a more powerful opening track than “Mothers of the Sun,” I’m not sure what that would be. A pulsing synth, a droning organ, a monster guitar riff, and the chilling vocals of Amber Webber and Stephen McBean keep us in suspense for more than three minutes before drummer Josh Wells kicks in to kick things into overdrive on what is an incredibly satisfying psychedelic rock record that never fizzles into pointless jam territory. McBean’s guitar solos are lyrical and evocative of Funkadelic great Eddie Hazel, but it’s Jeremy Schmidt’s keyboards that steal this show.

7. Tami Neilson – Don’t Be Afraid. “Lonely won’t leave me alone,” sings the Canadian expat who’s built a career as New Zealand’s top country vocalist. It’s impossible to feel alone in the presence of Neilson’s powerhouse voice, however: equal parts Patsy Cline and Mavis Staples, she’s capable of reducing an entire audience to tears—in the best possible way. Dedicated to her late father, the patriarch of a family band that toured Canada in her youth, Don’t Be Afraid is emotionally deeper than anything Neilson has done to date, which was well-executed but decidedly retro, bordering on kitsch. Not this time. She digs deep, and comes out on top.

8. TUNS – s/t. It’s never too late to start over. Veterans of Haligonian ’90s indie rock—Sloan’s Chris Murphy, Super Friendz’s Matt Murphy and the Inbreds’ Mike O’Neill—form this power trio, in which the three frontmen effortlessly weave their melodies and riffs together in joyous, harmony-rich, three-minute pop songs that twist and turn but never fall off the rails.

9. Jim Bryson – Somewhere We Will Find Our Place. On the surface, this Ottawa singer-songwriter (and sideman to Kathleen Edwards, the Weakerthans and Tragically Hip) writes pleasant, sad-sack Ontario folk-rock (one of my default favourite genres). But his interest in synths and experience doing production work on the side—as well as bringing in Broken Social Scene’s Charles Spearin as a collaborator, and Shawn Everett (the Grammy-winning Alabama Shakes engineer)—informs the expanded sonic palette heard here, which provide vivid colours to his tales of disconnection and ennui.

10. Hidden Cameras – Home on Native Land. In the last 15 years, Joel Gibb’s Hidden Cameras inspired Arcade Fire’s debut album, brought a queer aesthetic into a strait-laced indie scene, and went full-on electro on their last album. Here, however, Gibb goes full-on country, which suits both his songwriting and his voice. He throws in a few covers—including a take on “Dark End of the Street” that places the soul song in a closeted context, and a joyous romp through “Log Driver’s Waltz” with Feist, Rufus Wainwright and Mary Margaret O’Hara—but it’s his originals that serve as a reminder of his unique talent.

Michael Barclay’s full album list, Canadian and otherwise, can be found here.

Tory Lanez performs on the first day of the Austin City Limits Music Festival on Friday, Sept. 30, 2016, in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Jack Plunkett/Invision/AP)

BEST IN CANADIAN HIP-HOP IN 2016, NON-DRAKE EDITION: It was another excellent year for Drake—an album that set Billboard chart records and brought him his first number-one single and a slew of Grammy nominations will do that. But Canadian hip-hop and R&B was plenty fertile if you look past the Six God. Adrian Lee highlights nine Canadian hip-hop or R&B artists whose work in 2016 are worth celebrating—none of whom are Aubrey Drake Graham.

Plaza. So he doesn’t want to be compared to the Weeknd. But if that were the case, maybe he shouldn’t drape himself in the same secretive branding exercise and similar gauzy, hazy sounds. All this to say: his debut EP One is terrific, a less debauched Abel who may prove to be just as able.

River Tiber. A lightyear leap forward from his ambient-verging-on-sleepy EP, River Tiber’s debut LP Indigo is phenomenal—tonally moody and murky and melodious, a kind of ultramodern blues that does a lot with a little. The multi-instrumentalist’s ethereal voice has become a perfect, baleful match. This is music for speeding through a highway tunnel at 2 AM.

PartyNextDoor. OVO’s second-billing star—who probably could’ve called it a year after writing Rihanna’s “Work”—appears to have acquired his boss Drake’s predilection for bloat: PND’s sophomore album, P3, was meandering and overlong. But it featured some incredible moments, from the stripped-down soca-tinged “Not Nice” to the sparse, yearning “Come and See Me”. And its opening song, “High Hopes,” leaves the listener with, well, high hopes for his instincts; even though it’s a seven-minute ballad, its slow burn does come with a worthwhile payoff.

Tory Lanez. His much-hyped album I Told You was a letdown: its skit-heavy concept was a millstone around its neck, and the enormous chip on his shoulder became grating on a long-play. But his standout tracks this year—which include a remix of “Controlla” that was so good it caused Drake to lash out—established him as a star that can make any crowd turn up.

Tasha The Amazon. Like the woman warriors that her name conjures, herferociouseight-track EP Die Every Day goes hard across heavy, skittering production, with Tasha roaming the plains, spears up. Like the massive online corporation that her name has nothing to do with, I’m looking forward to the arrival of my next delivery.

Dillan Ponders. It’s rare to find a drug rapper that’s as blunt as they are blunted. But Toronto’s leading light-upper eschews pleasant buzz for hallucinogenic trap and sharp bars. His summer EP You’re Welcome 2found him spitting croaky, localized verses over big-name beats (“I don’t tell lies/I ain’t on my John Tory”); his next mixtape Acid Reign, which comes out Dec. 28, should be worth the listen.

Roy Woods. Saddled with a listless lead single, Woods’ debut LP Waking At Dawn shouldn’t be judged by the inert Gwan Big Up Urself. Instead, he shines when he channels Michael Jackson’s slashing vocals (“Switch”) and when he sounds as hollowing as the feelings he’s expressing, as on “Menace”.

Jahkoy. Signed to Def Jam, the Jeremih-channelling R&B singer has found his stride by decamping for lush Los Angeles, which earned him a Schoolboy Q verse on his EP Foreign Waterand an easy, breezy sound. Eschewing rapping for singing, he’ll be releasing a full LP in 2017.

Pryde. The Filipino rapper from Brampton, Ont. brings a curlicuing flow and free-wheeling lyricism to the table, which has been missing ever since taking a break to care for his mother, who passed away in 2015. His I Don’t Belong Here EP introduces a level of introspection, its first song a painful depiction of his mother’s death.

Calling Anthony Bourdain just a chef would be like calling poulet en vessie a chicken dish. Since his dazzling 2000 debut memoir Kitchen Confidential, a revolutionary read that revealed the bacchanalian secrets of his industry and made him into cooking’s enfant terrible, he’s become a true multi-hyphenate: a bestselling author of essays, fiction and travelogues; a jet-setting filmmaker finding treasures and truths in places around the world on shows like CNN’s Parts Unknown, a series whose influence is best reflected by a surreal September one-on-one interview with President Barack Obama in a Hanoi hole-in-the-wall; he’s helming a new international market in New York City; he’s even a competitive jiu-jitsu fighter. He hasn’t worked in a kitchen for years. Now, at 60, he’s returning to his roots, somewhat, with a new cookbook called Appetites—a bleeding, blazing thing full of Bourdain’s mesmerizing blend of vulnerable emotion and blustery writing, and the recipes for dishes he most frequently cooks for his top customers these days: his friends and family. Bourdain spoke to Maclean’s in Toronto about a bad boy becoming a dad, about the emotional toll of his amazing life, his role as a godfather for a generation of hard-living cooks, and why Canada’s culinary scene is great—Michelin stars or no.

Q: Why now, for a new cookbook? I ask not just because it’s been 12 years since your last one, but because for someone who has been so many things since, a cookbook feels oddly traditional.

A: Yeah. Don’t much care. It’s certainly reflective of a really important part of my life—I’ve been cooking for a nine-year-old and her friends for the better part of seven or eight years. It’s how I cook today, it’s what makes me happy. I tend to overcompensate for my long absences when I’m home by cooking and it’s therapeutic to me—it’s how I express love for my daughter. It felt good to do.

Q: And traditional, for Anthony Bourdain, isn’t a bad thing?

A: Look, I admire people who do things that are interesting to them, who don’t have a strategy or a master plan or have a brand—I don’t care about any of those things.

Q: You’ve written a fair few memoirs, but was writing a cookbook—with its intimate details, and its look into your family—just as personal?

A: Yeah. I think it’s important if you’re going to write a cookbook, it should sound like you talking—it should be things you actually believe, otherwise I’m not interested. Food is so personal—I mean someone is talking to you when people are cooking for you. I like to hear an identifiable voice. The cookbooks I value the most in my collection are the ones where you hear the author’s voice and point-of-view in every recipe—Fergus Henderson’s Nose to Tail [Eating], Marco Pierre White’s seminal White Heat, [Montrealers] Fred Morin and Dave McMillan’s book, [The Art of Living According to] Joe Beef. [Montreal’s Au Pied Du Cochon chef] Martin Picard’s book. There is clearly a guiding voice or a point of view, otherwise these are just a list of recipes, and you can get those online.

Q: It’s also a history of the places you’ve been to, and the stories tied up in them.

A: The older I get, and the more I travel in particular, the less I care about what exactly is in the dish than who’s cooking it and why.

Q: The book is dedicated to your nine-year-old daughter, Ariane. How do you juggle your busy life with being a father?

A: The best I can. I’m away 250 days a year. It’s a tough situation. But at one point I told my daughter, ‘Look, honey, I’m thinking of hanging it up maybe some day so I can spend more time with you.’ She burst into tears. ‘But daddy, your job is so interesting! What will I tell my friends?’

Q: How long do you see yourself working like this?

A: I have the best job in the world. I’m not going to get off the pony as long as they let me ride it. I go anywhere I want, do whatever I want when I get there, they let me make self-indulgent TV about that experience, and give me about as much creative freedom as anyone’s ever had in the history of television. What am I going to do? Take up needlepoint?

Q: But there is this flip side of this amazing job. You spoke strikingly about the loneliness of your travel and filming schedule, and about your September split with your wife in People: ‘It comes at a cost.’

A: Look, it’s not normal, what I do. Just being on television isn’t. Thinking that your story is so interesting that other people will want to listen to it or read it or pay to hear it, that’s—what kind of person thinks that? A monster of self-regard. It’s not normal thinking. Particularly if you spent 30 years in the restaurant business, which is filled with people who think the same thing but are still working in the restaurant business. Being on television, being recognizable, this is unnatural. So I chose to live in this world. I was in an equally if not more dysfunctional world before that, when I was a chef. Which is healthier, which is better for trying to maintain some kind of relationship with people who don’t do what you do? Is it possible? Can you be a good person? I’ll let you know when I figure it out.

Q: Is there something inherently writerly about being a cook or a chef?

A: I think there’s a great storytelling tradition in the restaurant business that tends to attract people with an oral tradition of bulls–ting and bollocking. Creative people, people for whom the 9-to-5 world is not attractive or impossible. It seems that way. There are a lot of stories in the business, and a lot of characters—and it seems to attract its share of artists and writers and people who hope to do something creative in their lives.

Q: Both fields have, perhaps, this kind of narcissism.

A: There’s no “kind of” about it—there’s something not normal about you if you’re writing a book about yourself, or about anything. And if you’re the kind of person who can deal with being recognized by strangers and if that’s tolerable or pleasing to you, and not immediately terrifying, that’s not normal either.

Q: That fame and buzz around celebrity chefs has been around for some time now. Will we ever hit peak celebrity chef culture?

A: People in Gordon Ramsay’s generation, or Marco Pierre White—in the beginning, they had no expectations that they were going to end up on television. They learned to adapt to this new world. They didn’t go into the business to be on TV or write books or to get famous—they just wanted to be successful chefs. We now have a generation of people who in many cases feel that if they become chefs, they’ll get a TV show. They have a signature haircut, a year into the business, or a branding arrangement with a shoe company. I don’t really relate to that. I guess this is the world we live in now.

Q: It’s not a reflection of the reality of the job, which is grinding repetition.

A: By my way of thinking, if the high-water mark of your life is three episodes of Top Chef, you better have a Plan B. You can’t be milking that teat for the rest of your life—and some people do! They do these Top Chef cruises, they don’t have their own restaurants.

Q: There are a lot of fans who see you as this character, as this bad-boy figure.

A: But actually, with [first memoir] Kitchen Confidential, I was writing about a period of time that had already elapsed. When I wrote it, I was 43. I wasn’t snorting cocaine, I was pretty settled in my life. I knew that about myself, but the perceived me…I’m not complaining about it, it worked well for me that I didn’t feel any obligation to live that role. It was long dead to me anyway; I lived those years—they hadn’t turned out so good to me.

Q: But now there are those people who act in this way as a kind of archetype of you—which is ironic, because it’s not like Kitchen Confidential was necessarily you glamourizing your lifestyle.

A: Jen Agg at [Toronto restaurant] the Black Hoof wrote about this, about how Kitchen Confidential not intentionally, but probably, empowered a kind of meathead culture of cooks that felt like they’d be given permission to act out their worst impulses. Look, I’m not going to say I regret it. I acknowledge it. I’m a little embarrassed by it. But I think if you read the book carefully to start with, drugs didn’t work out too well for me. I’m of a generation that romanticizes and maybe even over-romanticized things that were painful, that hurt others. I feel that. But I don’t know if I have any regrets.

Q: Your CNN series Parts Unknown has been more political than your past series, but food still appears throughout as a focus. Is there something inherently political about food?

A: Very political—nothing’s more political. Who eats or doesn’t eat? What are we eating? What are they eating in Cuba? Is that working? If people are working only rice and beans for much of their diet, it says something. If people are eating mostly pickles after many generations, where did that come from? It’s reflective of history, often a painful history. It’s central to a culture, to a history, to a personal story. It’s communication at its most fundamental.

Q: When you do eat on these shows, something you frequently say is that it’s “magic,” or tastes “magical.” Is that still true, after decades of working with and writing about food?

A: Yeah. I think that’s what’s great about it—even if you’re hearing about it from a jaded son of a bitch, once in a while something happens on a pan or a plate that feels metaphysical.

Q: There’s a lot to be proud of, in Canada’s restaurant scene. But it’s not clear if we’re enjoying critical success—we have, for instance, no Michelin-starred restaurants.

A: You’re not missing anything. Who needs that kind of validation?! I think it’s meaningless. We’ve moved way beyond that.

Q: I was going to ask whether something was wrong with Canada’s restaurant scene if we didn’t have one.

A: No, no, no, I think you’re doing it right if Michelin hasn’t come. They’re utterly useless, and in no way prepared or capable of evaluating restaurants in a modern setting. How do you award stars? What’s the throughline of spectacular soup dumplings or a little tower of foie gras and truffles? No single organization is competent enough to put it all on the same scale. The world they live in now is in no way the world the Michelin system was set up to evaluate back in France, which was all about motorists and seeing if it was worth driving an extra 50 miles for a restaurant. It’s a silly thing. Why do you want to help a tire company? You don’t owe them nothing.

Q: Is there anything else you haven’t done that you want to do?

A: Yeah, I’d like to make a show with Keith Richards.

Q: A whole series or just an episode?

A: I think all I can hope for is a show. I’d love to play bass with Parliament Funkadelic, but I can’t play bass, so I don’t think that’s going to happen.

Q: You could always learn.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/anthony-bourdain-look-its-not-normal-what-i-do/feed/1How to do an on-screen accent—and why it can be okayhttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/arts/how-to-do-an-on-screen-accent-and-why-it-can-be-okay/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/arts/how-to-do-an-on-screen-accent-and-why-it-can-be-okay/#respondTue, 11 Oct 2016 16:46:19 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=935373The man who plays 'Appa' in Kim's Convenience launches into a passionate argument about accents on TV

Jean Yoon (Umma), Paul Sun-Hyung Lee (Appa) and Andrea Bang (Janet) in a still from an episode of Kim’s Convenience. (Handout/CBC)

As TV shows and films begin to reflect a wider, more diverse audience, it’s also opened the door for a tricky topic: an actor’s use of an accent. It can be off-putting to audiences unfamiliar with the accent—and it can be downright racist-feeling to the communities themselves, especially when the creator doesn’t have roots in the community, and the accent feels like a comical costume. (In the Chuck Lorre show Two Broke Girls, for example, the joke around restaurant owner Han Lee tends to be laughing at, not with, the thickly accented character.)

For Asians, the accent is a particularly prickly subject. For people of colour who want to assimilate, it can be inherently embarrassing to hear something they’re trying to escape; for people of colour fiercely proud and protective of their culture, an inauthentic accent can enrage, as it did for some viewers of Fresh Off the Boat; for actors of colour, it can be limiting, as explored on Aziz Ansari’s Netflix show Master of None, and it can be difficult to be caught in between the first two groups.In general, it can leave people on tenterhooks that any accented Asian character could be another Long Duk Dong from Sixteen Candles, whose stilted tongue and social buffoonery represented an incredible setback for Asian representation.

Paul Sun-Hyung Lee, 44, plays the storeowner family patriarch Appa in the pioneering new CBC sitcom Kim’s Convenience, and he’s been personally grappling with the politics and the practicalities of doing an accent his entire career. Here, Lee explains why Appa leans into his accent, where it comes from—and why, done right, it’s okay.

“It’s who Appa is—not the accent, but that’s his makeup. He’s an immigrant, English is his second language, and he had to learn English at a very late stage of his life, so he’s going to have vestiges of his original voice, his mother tongue. That also informs who he is. His frustration is not being able to articulate how he feels, or any points he tries to make in an argument. It’s a singularly frustrating thing.

“I remember in Winnipeg, someone very helpfully in a talkback said, ‘You know, if you just spoke more slowly and clearly, everybody could understand you. Because I missed every third word that came out of your mouth.’ A lot of people in the audience rolled their eyes and went, ‘Oh my God,’ but I responded. I said: I’m sorry you felt that way, but can you imagine what it’s like for this man, a trained teacher in his home country, a very well-respected position—he’s an intelligent man, he doesn’t sound intelligent maybe to you because English is his second language, but his brain is still there. Can you imagine his struggles, day in, day out, that people aren’t able to understand him? As frustrated as you were because you couldn’t understand him, he’s even more frustrated because you can’t understand him.

“For me, I can get touchy about the accent. For the longest time, I couldn’t do a Korean accent. It was just the way I was raised—I didn’t want to be Korean. I wanted to be Canadian. I didn’t want kimbap at school, all I wanted was sandwiches, or soups, but none of this Korean stuff. When you’re a kid and you’re really trying to fit in, you push away everything that reminds you of your family because your family is different. That kind of extended itself as I got older; then, as an Asian actor, I was asked to utilize these accents. That’s fine: I can do Cantonese, and Mandarin, I can do passable Japanese, I can do some Filipino, Vietnamese—but not Korean. Korean for me was a roadblock. I remember I was doing this one episode of Mayday, and I was playing the role of Captain Park, the Korean Airlines pilot who crashes his plane into the side of this mountain. When I auditioned for the role, no accent was required. So I can do all the pilot lingo, I love it—I book the role. Then, on set, the director says, ‘We want the Korean accent, to give it some flavour.’ I said, ‘I don’t know if I can do it.’ ‘But you’re Korean.’ So I tried it and I was so bad that they ended up giving all my lines to the copilot. That was embarrassing—so embarrassing. It was terrible.

“When I read for Kim’s Convenience for the first time ever the words struck me so much and the writing was so incredibly articulate. And he has the rhythms. As soon as I started reading it—and I’ve told this story a million times, everyone’s sick of it—it was like a key being turned in my head, a door being opened, and my dad’s voice just started coming out. So I use my dad’s accent—that’s my dad’s voice that I use on stage. But a lot of the time it’s a modified accent, because if I went full Korean accent people wouldn’t be able to understand a lot of what I’m saying. So there are times where I’ll cheat, I’ll pull back, and it’s not 100 per cent consistent, and I realize that. That’s one of these horrible decisions you have to make as an actor. Is it really going to affect who this character is if you’re not letter-perfect on the accent, or is it more important to get the story points across? Over the years it’s morphed into this whole Appa speak I have. But sometimes the accent isn’t 100 per cent there.

“I get feedback, and I’m sensitive to it—I hear people go, ‘That doesn’t sound Korean, who is this guy! He’s not Korean, he should be ashamed, he sounds terrible, how come they can’t get accents right?’ That bothers me. I care about the character so much. I am Korean. And you know what, and pardon my French, but f–k you, that’s my dad’s voice. So if you don’t like it, go f–k yourself, because that’s how my dad sounds. But on the other side, I hear a lot of people saying that it sounds like their dad. I’ve had Korean families whose fathers have passed away, they’re in tears, and they say, ‘You sound just like our Appa did.’ They hadn’t heard his voice in years. And it’s incredibly moving.

“The accent—the accent isn’t the joke. It’s part of who he is, but it isn’t the joke. Yes, we’re in the entertainment field, and we will mine some of that because it is situational humour. You will get a point where we’ll say, ‘Here’s where some fun can be made, playing with the accent, and his inability and people mishearing what he says.’ But at the same time, that’s not all it is. So for people to summarily dismiss it as, ‘Well, it’s just a voice, he should be ashamed,’ well, they’re not really looking. They’re taking so many things out of context, and it’s a lazy way of criticizing somebody because it’s the most obvious and easiest thing to pick on. That’s why when you’re looking for directors and people to work on Kim’s Convenience, we wanted to make sure they knew where the source of the true humour was. Appa is not just a voice. He’s not a stereotype. A stereotype is the end of a character. Appa is an archetype—they take his mould, they use that as a basis, and they build that up into a three-dimensional character. You have his hopes, his fears, his foibles and his strengths, and that’s what I love about him. He’s a character.

“But it’s funny, though—the majority of people who are screaming racism about the accent online are white. And it’s like: what’s racist about it? They won’t say—but is it because you’re seeing Asians on the screen? Oh, no? Well, then it must be because he sounds different. Well, guess what: Asian people have accents. The accent isn’t about a joke, it’s part of who that character is, but it doesn’t make it intrinsically racist. If you’re uncomfortable with that baggage, then you need to examine it yourself and see where it comes from.”

The cast of the new CBC sitcom, Kim’s Convenience, stand together for a portrait. The show will premiere on Tuesday. Oct. 11. (CBC)

For a racially pioneering show on Canada’s traditionally play-it-safe public broadcaster, the first scene of Kim’s Convenience, CBC’s newest sitcom, is downright radical.

Two gay men enter a convenience store in a gentrifying Toronto neighbourhood and ask its cantankerous Korean shop owner if they can put up their Pride Week poster. He stiffly declines. “I have no problem with the gay,” he says, continuing to restock shelves. “But I have a problem with the parade: traffic, garbage, noise. If you is the gay, why can’t you be quiet, respectful gay?”

The little scene says a lot—about immigrants’ inquisitive relationship with unfamiliar communities, to the idea of the “model minority” that hangs over so many Asians in North America. But it also says that Kim’s Convenience, which premieres Tuesday, isn’t what many might prejudge it to be. With a not-so-PC introduction, it dismisses fears that the show could be a treacly and bland “diversity effort” from a vanilla public broadcaster. And while Kim’s Convenience is making history—it’s Canada’s first TV sitcom led by Asian actors—it shows that just because it’s a cultural first, it’s unwilling to be anything other than a charming, effervescent, and modern sitcom. Model minority bedamned.

But its creator demurs. “Thinking about it now, and I didn’t even think about it until now—it is kind of a gutsy first scene,” said a laughing Ins Choi, 42, who wrote the much-loved play that forms the foundation of the series. It wasn’t even intentional—the decision to vault the audience right into a world that remains oddly unfamiliar to many Canadians, and eschew the scene-setting norms of a pilot episode, came from a last-ditch pitch about the idea of a “gay discount” to network execs. “The executives chuckled, but they were also kind of worried. And it was just happenstance that it was the first episode.”

That kind of inadvertent success feels right, given Choi’s trajectory. Kim’s Convenience was his first-ever play, a simple effort at writing what he knew—and the touching script he wrote, about a Korean shop owner and his immigrant family, turned into a monster success. It sold out a string of Toronto Fringe shows in 2011 before a national tour and a smash run at Toronto theatre company Soulpepper.

It wasn’t long before TV and movie producers began clamouring for an adaptation. But Choi, who even today feels wowed by the success of his play, didn’t feel quite ready for it. “I was in no rush—but I was scared, and I didn’t want to make a mistake. Everyone smelled…not fishy, but not warm,” he said. “Whenever there’s a person of colour, whether it’s an artist or writer or producer, there’s so few of us out here that whenever there’s a little bit of opportunity, it’s like, ‘Don’t ruin it for all of us, okay?’ And then people had such a rich experience with the show, I didn’t want anything to taint it. There was a definite palpable pressure.”

He put the time to good use. He worked on other shows. He toured Kim’s Convenience nationally, finding success in big theatres in communities like Winnipeg and Port Hope, Ont. That tour gave the pair that help form the heart of the play—storeowner Appa, inhabited by Paul Sun-Hyung Lee, and his religious, hopeful wife Umma, played by Jean Yoon—more time to live in the characters. That move paid off when the CBC cast Lee and Yoon in the same roles for the TV adaptation; the fact that they’ve played them for years gives the show a big, confident head start.

“It was so striking finally hearing my own dad’s voice and seeing my family’s story depicted so authentically,” says Lee, who plays Appa—Korean for “Dad.” “I knew I wanted to be part of this.”

Jean Yoon (Umma), Paul Sun-Hyung Lee (Appa) and Andrea Bang (Janet) in a still from an episode of Kim’s Convenience. (Handout/CBC)

In the meantime, the landscape for Asians in pop culture shifted, even if ever so slightly. Before the cancelled Selfie and 2015’s Fresh Off the Boat—now entering its third season—there have only ever been a handful of shows that featured Asian leads: the vapid spinoff Mr. T and Tina, Margaret Cho’s doomed All-American Girl, the Maggie Q vehicle Nikita, and CBS’s Martial Law*. The yellow-face shadow of Sixteen Candles‘ Long Duk Dong looms large as Asians remain limited to somewhere on the miniature spectrum between kung-fu master to nerdy friend. “I’ve played a doctor so many times, I told my mom, ‘I don’t need to go to medical school, I know what it’s like from TV,’ ” said Lee.

Less representation on screen also means fewer opportunities for Asians in the industry. “There’s a dearth of Asian actors, especially of a certain age,” said Lee, 44. “You start off wanting to be a lead of a series or this or that, and it becomes very apparent that you’re not going to get these opportunities—you don’t look a certain way, or there’s no opportunities for you that aren’t ethnically specific. So you’re caught feeling like you have to play the same stock stereotypical characters. As an older actor, you can drive yourself mental getting over that fact.”

But for proof of the pace of TV’s belated revelation that everyone’s stories are worth telling, look no further than the quick-rising career of Simu Liu, who now has prominent roles in both Kim’s Convenience and the upcoming NBC series Taken—despite entering the industry less than five years ago. (Disclosure: The author and Liu are friends from high school, where they performed together in an all-Asian boyband, because of course they did.) On Kim’s, he plays Appa’s troubled heartthrob son Jung, in a “bit of a conscious choice,” according to Choi, and as Liu chuckles, it makes him one of the first Asian men to be sexually objectified on Canadian TV—a small strange thing perhaps, but not insignificant to a demographic that’s so often represented as the emasculated eunuch. “It is a huge achievement, to be objectified,” laughs Liu, 27. “But having positive Asian role models is a big thing, I never really had that growing up.”

But he’s deferential to the work that paved his way. “Whatever trouble I’ve experienced as a performer of colour absolutely pales in comparison to what Paul and Jean endured. It means there’s been real progress that’s been made—and there’s work to go and room to grow in the future.”

What makes Kim’s Convenience work, though, goes beyond the Korean heritage that the show refuses to leave behind—it’s because of the universality of its spirit. That’s intentional, Choi says, adding that he and his writing partner, Kevin White, didn’t initially model the show off Fresh Off The Boat or Master of None, Aziz Ansari’s exploration of being Indian, but rather shows like Louie, Arrested Development, or Modern Family. “We wanted not to serve the audience too much, but hang back and hope they come toward us. We didn’t want to force-feed to the audience what they were seeing, or translating it for them. You write for the intelligence of the audience, that was definitely part of the strategy around the show we wanted to create.”

That’s an attitude usually gifted to shows that bear far less pioneering pressure than this one. And so, that gutsy first scene. In a country where a CBC/Angus Reid poll suggested that 68 per cent of Canadians agree with the bloodless, senseless conceit that immigrants “should do more to fit in better with mainstream Canadian society,” where its politicians toy with the idea of “values,” and where, despite that, Canadians smugly believe their race issues aren’t nearly as riven as America’s, Kim’s Convenience is perhaps necessarily bold.

“That first scene will make some people feel a little awkward, not knowing whether to laugh, or if they can laugh,” said Choi. “I mean, the idea of the ‘model minority’ doesn’t really translate over to LGBTQ groups, but that’s in there too. We’re asking: What kind of Syrians do we like? What kind of lesbians are acceptable?”

So there are no apologies for making Canadians think about immigrant issues, right away. There’s no handholding explanation of the role of the convenience store in Korean life. No justification or Anglicization of Appa’s thick immigrant accent, an accent that Lee is proud of. No warning or explanation when one parent or the other slips into Korean. Kim’s is just a TV show, using its big shot to be bold, be itself, and be good. Radical, indeed.

Correction, Oct. 11, 2016: A previous version of this post suggested that there were only two shows with Asian leads before 2014. There have been at least four.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/television/kims-convenience-a-tv-first-that-doesnt-buckle-under-the-pressure/feed/7The Toronto Police let the Jays beer thrower—and all of us—downhttp://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/the-toronto-police-let-the-jays-beer-thrower-and-all-of-us-down/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/the-toronto-police-let-the-jays-beer-thrower-and-all-of-us-down/#commentsThu, 06 Oct 2016 00:41:34 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=933657The Blue Jays fan who threw a beer at the Orioles game was wrong. But the police response may be even worse.

Baltimore Orioles’ Hyun Soo Kim gets under a fly ball as a beer can sails past him during seventh inning American League wild-card game action against the Toronto Blue Jays in Toronto, Tuesday, Oct. 4, 2016. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Mark Blinch

It was, all things considered, just about a perfect night. While the United States continued immolating itself with a vice-presidential debate that provided no further clarity in a barroom-brawl election, Tuesday night also saw the Toronto Blue Jays taking a winner-take-all wild-card game in extra innings. That had never happened in these dramatic terms before—with an Edwin Encarnacion bomb of a home run. It was, if you were a Blue Jays fan—or even just a baseball fan who didn’t cheer for the Orioles—incredible.

Well, it was almost perfect. Denting the night: One can of Bud Lite beer, slung close to Baltimore Orioles left-fielder Hyun-Soo Kim, as he was making a catch in the outfield.

Let me start by saying that throwing this can was unquestionably, unconditionally, absolutely stupid. Society operates on rules so blindingly obvious that they don’t even need to be stated. People don’t drive past highway medians into oncoming traffic. We don’t go around knocking things out of people’s hands. Fans don’t throw things onto a pro sports field. Society works because of our implicit trust that people won’t do these things because we are people. We are not animals.

So it’s not totally surprising that Canadians (and beyond) became amateur CSI investigators, sleuthing for clues in the tape like it was the Zapruder film. And however much the Jays stirred national unity with their elation, the real unity has come from this heady hunt for someone who dared embarrass an entire fan base and country in front of the world. (Canadians cannot abide looking bad to the U.S.)

So when there had been no movement on identifying the person by the next day, that didn’t stop people across Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit from pronouncing that they had found the perp. This manhunt isn’t ideal—online shaming can absolutely ruin lives—but this is, frustratingly, human nature in 2016.

Time for the professionals in the police department to step in, right? Well, nearly 24 hours after the suds were spilled, they did…with a tweet offering the masses a picture of who they think is social media’s enemy. “Pls RT,” they begged.

No matter what this man may or may not have done, this is unacceptable.

Police must be held to a higher standard than to grant the already slavering social mob a target as a way to find information. If anything, this is the message that movements like Black Lives Matter have been urging for many hard years now: we ask a lot of police because they have an outsize role in our society. It’s why they get to carry guns. And if we are to respect them as our protectors, then we must have faith that they will protect us.

In this, Toronto Police Services failed in their mission by releasing the photo of the suspect on social media. Doing so was the equivalent of throwing Kobe beef into a pen of starving lions. And while yes, police departments regularly release photos of suspects in minor crimes, they are rarely already being sought by national, international and social media as public enemy number one—and if they are, it’s for terror, or murder, or a truly villainous crime. Here, TPS did not protect a man suspected of a dumb can-throwing so much as they stoked a raging fire with his grainy effigy.

It is important to say, too, that suspects are just that: suspects. Even if the police find this man, we do not yet know with 100 per cent certainty that he threw the beer. Suspects are not criminals; they are innocent, after all, until proven guilty. They remain deserving of our police’s protection. But because of social media, fuelled by a trusted institution like the police, his life will be in tatters anyway. (So too, likely, are the reputations of the other men and women whose crimes were to sit near the perpetrator that night.) (Update:The Toronto Sun has identified the man police are searching for. It’s unclear whether he threw the can.)

The police aren’t even the only institution to let us down Wednesday evening. The Toronto Sun offered $1,000 to anyone who could provide information leading to the suspect—a depressing low moment for journalism, offering money for a source on a relatively small-potatoes crime, and then offering the shade of its own credibility to the amateur vigilantes on YouTube and social media. Leave aside that this is a journalism outlet offering to pay for information—how can we now take seriously the gravity of any crime coverage that doesn’t meet their $1,000 barometer? What will we think of murders or rapes or assaults that don’t meet this apparent bar of worthiness?

One aside: It’s telling that it’s the beer can that has infuriated Canadians, when it’s also been alleged that fans hurled racial slurs at Kim and centre-fielder Adam Jones. Can we offer a little outrage there? No: We have assigned our priorities. A social-media manhunt for the man who did an unquestionably stupid thing. Also, if you can gin it up, perhaps spare some disdain for the racists.

When the fog of war lifts from this whole incident, and the investigation reaches its end, there is the hope that we will consider the wrongs have happened here. That was the case when officials and social media got it desperately, horribly wrong after the Boston Marathon bombing and the Dallas shooting—two incidents with far, far higher-stakes concerns. But it’s unclear we will. It is the tragicomic flipside of closely scrutinizing the police: the suspect pictured isn’t a person of colour or a woman, for whom we rightly question the cop tactics on, in the aftermath. But this is a police overstep, pure and simple. This is an ignorance of the mission of police: to protect and serve. And that affects us all.

Rick Osterloh, SVP Hardware at Google, introduces the Pixel Phone by Google during the presentation of new Google hardware in San Francisco, California, U.S. October 4, 2016. (Beck Diefenbach/Reuters)

It was a barely kept secret, with spec details flying out through a cottage industry of insiders and leaks. A glitzy tech event in a California venue—a restored chocolate factory—was live-streamed across the world. An army of tech writers picked apart and reviewed the performance of each of its parts upon its buzzy release.

If all this feels familiar—a launch event for a smartphone—it’s because it is. Maybe as recently as Sept. 7, when Apple launched its iPhone 7. But for Google, a massive company that has largely treated hardware as a hobby, it’s relatively new ground. “We’re really excited for the worst-kept secret ever,” said Darren Seefried, Google Canada’s head of hardware partnerships, to laughter at a launch event in Toronto. And on a day that Google had been heralding as a major announcement—the reveal of the Google Pixel, its first true incursion into the smartphone market—the spectre of the company it’s hoping to send a shot across the bow was hard to miss.

But there was one thing that made it starkly different from an iPhone launch: On a day a new phone was announced, the phone wasn’t really the star of the show. It was the shift to AI.

First, the day’s superficial news itself: after occasional flirtations, Google is plunging fully into the hardware world, and there are a lot of new devices, albeit fewer for Canadians. Google is entering the virtual-reality field with a comfortable, breathable headset, the Google Daydream VR, with promises of partners like J.K. Rowling and The New York Times. It announced Google WiFi, routers set to improve internet connectivity across all corners of your home. Its device-to-TV streaming Chromecast—which Google found enjoyed a 160 per cent increase in overall watch time last year—gets an upgrade, providing 4K resolution with higher speeds, coming later this year. Google Home, an Amazon Echo replica, is a speaker with Google Assistant built-in, integrated with your home systems and your pre-existing Google devices (though this won’t be available in Canada for the foreseeable future.)

But no hardware news was louder than the Google Pixel, a “made by Google” phone and its foray into the premium smartphone market.

There were the typical boasts: It preened about its battery life, promising a quick-charge ability that provides 7 hours of battery life in just 15 minutes. Leading camera analyzer DXOMark gave the Pixel’s 12.3 MP-resolution camera an 89 rating—the highest-ever for a smartphone. Pixel purchasers will get unlimited Google cloud storage to store those big, high-res photos and videos. It will be widely sold by carriers like Bell and Rogers (which owns Maclean’s) starting Oct. 20.

On its surface, it’s hard not to read the release of a premium Android phone as anything but a strike at Apple and its marquee iPhone. Throughout the launch, Google embraced that attitude, too, with more than a few pinches of salt: “There’s no unsightly camera bump,” pointedly noted Rick Osterloh, Google’s SVP of hardware, at one point. Later, boasting of Pixel’s unlimited cloud storage, a “Storage Full” pop-up in Apple’s trademark bubble appeared on screen. Later still, there was Google’s exultation about “a headphone jack,” actually listed as a Pixel feature, in the wake of Apple’s divisive decision to scrap it from the iPhone 7. And then there was Osterloh’s grand statement about Google’s “magic”: “The next big innovation is going to be at the intersection of hardware and software, with AI at the centre,” he said. And if that sounds familiar, it’s because Apple’s been talking about this for some time: “The magic of Apple, from a product point of view, happens at this intersection of hardware, software, and services. It’s that intersection,” said Apple chief Tim Cook, in a 2015 interview with Fast Company.

And that competitive jockeying with Apple can be true and real. After all, tech watchers have long surmised that only Google could mount a truly meaningful rivalry against Apple in an already crowded marketplace. But what really makes Pixel’s launch interesting is what this really means: In a world where the currency is increasingly data, rather than coin, Google’s hardware play is a Trojan horse—even if it is a beautiful one. It’s a move into making hardware that bolsters its bread-and-butter software, allows it to further integrate itself in our daily lives, and positions it to win the fight that probably matters more, long-term: over artificial intelligence and the machine-learning algorithms that power it.

South Korean professional Go player Lee Sedol reviews the match after finishing the final match of the Google DeepMind Challenge Match against Google’s artificial intelligence program, AlphaGo, in Seoul, South Korea, Tuesday, March 15, 2016. Google’s Go-playing computer program again defeated its human opponent in a final match on Tuesday that sealed its 4:1 victory. (Lee Jin-man/AP)

Google has long been using machine learning to improve its services. It’s how Google Images knows what pictures to spit out when you type things in—something it’s improved at in the last two years, from 89.6 to 93.9 per cent accuracy. It’s how they’ve managed to improve machine translation to the point that it’s approaching human accuracy. It’s how Google’s AlphaGo beat the world’s best human Go player in March. It’s how Google is getting better at knowing what individual users want, based on the data they create by how they use their apps.

To do all that, high-powered computers use machine learning, sifting through immense amounts of data to find patterns and learn. Users provide this data to Google through their searches and their activity across their many apps—Mail, Maps, Play, YouTube, and so on. And more data—along with better computing—refines AI and more advanced deep-learning systems. As Geoffrey Hinton, the Canadian godfather of deep learning-algorithms, said in an interview with Maclean’s: “In deep learning, the algorithms we use now are versions of the algorithms we were developing in the 1980s, the 1990s. People were very optimistic about them, but it turns out they didn’t work too well. Now we know the reason is they didn’t work too well is that we didn’t have powerful enough computers, we didn’t have enough data sets to train them.” Imagine the pace of Google’s AI development if it had even more directed information—with a phone that learns verbal cues and textual instructions, and takes detailed photos uploaded to an infinite bank of data, in the hands of many people?

So it was telling that Google’s Oct. 4 event started not with what consumers would invariably see as the major announcement—the new Pixel—but with new exultations over Google Assistant improvements. “We’re building hardware with the Google Assistant at its core,” said Sundar Pinchai, Google Inc.’s CEO, and indeed, the Pixel is the first phone with Assistant built in. That matters because Google’s presentation made clear that it envisions a world where you use Assistant’s vocal commands in lieu of text search, and is the big push for its Google Home, which even lets you automate home functions with verbal cues. In effect, the Pixel is a way for Google’s neural networks to gain even more insight into what people want and how they behave, information that benefits Google tremendously in its software development.

That’s really where the Pixel comes in, and why Google is doing this now: Google Pixel allows an IV drip to further fuel the AI beast. This is hardware in the service of software. And a phone, to that end, makes eminent sense: In 2015, 68 per cent of Canadians owned a smartphone, and according to a 2014 report, of the 33 hours a month Canadians spend online, 49 per cent of that was spent on mobile devices, on average. These numbers are sure to have risen today, proving that our phones are integrated deeply into the warp and weft of our lives. Putting a Google phone running Google products in people’s hands allows Google direct access to more data than ever before—an immense boon to the real prize, data sets for deep learning.

As a bonus, it will get to claim that the Pixel is a true “Google phone”; if the iPhone is, for many, the product that defines Apple as a whole for consumers, a phone promising to be made entirely by Google allows the Pixel phone, conjuring emotional attachments every day, to reflect back on the company at large. But for a device that’s “all about control” for Google, according to Google Canada’s Seefried, the Pixel isn’t actually truly “made by Google,” as the company has crowed in its launch hashtag and website; while it controls design, it has farmed out the manufacturing to HTC.

But those are small potatoes. Today isn’t about hardware vs. software, or even a new smartphone. Focusing on the Pixel would be missing the forest from the trees, confusing a short-term play for a long-term mission. Pinchai acknowledged it himself: “We’re moving from a mobile-first world, to an AI-first world.”

It’s little wonder, then, that Google scheduled the event for Oct. 4. Sure, there’s the symbolism that its Assistant is jockeying against Apple’s Siri assistant, publicly released exactly five years ago. It could also be because, on this Oct. 4, Google was saying 10-4—radio language for “understood.”

Google understands. And it’s hoping the Pixel allows its users to help them get more understanding.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/society/technology/why-googles-new-pixel-phone-is-a-trojan-horse/feed/0A neuroscientist author blinds readers with sciencehttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/a-debut-novel-from-neuroscientist-jay-hosking-three-years-with-the-rat/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/a-debut-novel-from-neuroscientist-jay-hosking-three-years-with-the-rat/#respondSat, 06 Aug 2016 13:45:28 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=908297Jay Hosking's Three Years With The Rat is unsettling like Paul Auster, complex like David Mitchell—and a bit unwieldy

Researcher Natassia Vieira holds a lab rat that is used for stem cells research at the Sao Paulo University Human Genome Research Center in Sao Paulo, Monday, March 3, 2008. (AP Photo/Andre Penner)

THREE YEARS WITH THE RAT

By Jay Hosking

It’s generally rare for scientists to become talented writers. This is more than mere anecdotal cliché; research institutions give short or no shrift to anything published beyond scientific journals, and there are few incentives to writing for the general public in clear, interesting ways.

So it is a thrill when a scientist proves them wrong. Enter Jay Hosking, a 36-year-old native of Oshawa, Ont., who contains multitudes: he has a Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of British Columbia as well as a creative writing M.F.A., and he’s currently a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard doing research on cognitive decision-making and the human brain. His debut novel, Three Years with the Rat, is a taut work of sci-fi noir with undertones of Paul Auster’s eerie New York Trilogy.

Set in an alternate-reality Toronto, Hosking’s book is a darkly creepy tale of time travel. Its unnamed first-person narrator moves to the city, meets up with his sister, Grace, and her boyfriend, John, then works to unravel the mystery of her abrupt disappearance—and what it has to do with the mysterious, mirror-filled box in the couple’s lab. It’s an ambitious time-hopping story of secret cyphers, sinister revenants and the rat of the title, a freed lab specimen named Buddy who serves as a kind of rodent Virgil.

Rat is written with steel-cold precision, yet it’s suffused with a pervasive sickliness that lends it an unsettling atmosphere. But Hosking’s tonal powers can be draining, and some of the characters’ dialogue is clunky and bloodless—particularly the narrator’s small cadre of indistinguishable friends. The story’s beating heart turns out not to be the narrator’s relationship with his missing sister but rather his quick kinship with John and his affair with Grace’s quotation-happy friend Nicole—which dims the stakes of the book’s central quest, which is to find Grace. And the mystery’s climactic reveal is a bit too sprawling even for Hosking to resolve confidently by the book’s end.

“I realize that if through science I can seize phenomena and enumerate them,” says Albert Camus through Nicole, “I cannot, for all that, apprehend the world.” That line gives the mystery its spine, but could just as easily be a criticism of the book. While the scope of Hosking’s ambition is on abundant display here, Three Years with the Rat also asks a lot from its readers, and its plot’s acrobatic complexity and tonal greyness makes the novel ultimately a tad unwieldy. Rats.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/a-debut-novel-from-neuroscientist-jay-hosking-three-years-with-the-rat/feed/0OVO Fest 2016: Drake, rap’s paranoid king, shores up his bordershttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/arts/ovo-fest-2016-drake-raps-paranoid-king-shores-up-his-borders/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/arts/ovo-fest-2016-drake-raps-paranoid-king-shores-up-his-borders/#respondTue, 02 Aug 2016 07:08:32 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=907305At the seventh annual State of the Drake, a king defends his crown against an uprising both nascent and imagined

It may be hard to remember that the first song officially released from Drake’s fourth studio album Views was something of an incongruous choice. That’s in part because of the fact that the menacing, leering track “Summer Sixteen” came out, despite its name, in the cold heart of January; it’s also incongruous because the song kicked off the album cycle, yet never actually found its way as one of the 20 tracks on Drake’s critically divisive, commercially blockbuster, and certainly overlong ode to the city and seasons of Toronto. On “Summer Sixteen”, he took shots at Meek Mill, his ghostwriting accuser, in a beef that hasn’t so much fizzled as it has been glossed away; he also fired warning flares at Toronto’s new generation of rappers who might consider coming for his title. “I’m out here looking for revenge, all summer sixteen,” he wailed. But listening to the song now, the decision to cut it makes sense: it feels too specific, too of a place and time, for a project that Drake declared, on the album itself, was “already a classic.”

But the atmosphere inside Toronto’s sold-out Air Canada Centre on Sunday and Monday night at a two-evening OVO Fest—the seventh annual concert starring the self-billed Six God and a litany of surprise-guest friends that have previously included everyone from Jay Z and Stevie Wonder to Kanye West and a reunion of the group TLC, sans Left Eye—suggests that the song may be the best reflection of 2016’s still-evolving version of Drake. OVO Fest has long doubled as an annual temperature-taking State of the Drizzy, and this year, as the monochromatic children of the city milled about in the ACC—summer-kissed in either only pristine white or exclusively slim drapey black, with only the occasional zippered olive or OVO-sanctioned gold—a paranoid kind of revenge was in the air.

It was written on the merch, emblazoned in angry orange Thrasher-style lettering on $55 shirts from OVO’s vertically integrated fashion line. It was imbued in the location choice: for the first year, OVO Fest exchanged the summery open field of Molson Amphitheatre for a closed-off, chilly cement stadium date as part of a North American concert tour—a move that made some fear that this would mark the end of the surprising and thrilling OVO Fests as we knew them to exist. (Surprise appearances by Kanye West, Rihanna, Popcaan and French Montana, plus the weekend’s listed headliners Future, Snoop Dogg, Wiz Khalifa, and a roster of Caribbean stars, allayed that fear somewhat.) And then, in case anyone missed the message, Drake’s show began with “Summer Sixteen”—after OVO associates Baka, Roy Woods and dvsn took the stage to kiss the ring—with a dark stage firing surveillance Klieg lights into the crowd before a screen lit up in white flames to make clear what the Six God was looking-looking-looking for: REVENGE.

(Photograph by Adrian Lee)

If revenge feels like an odd animating force for a superstar rapper who has basically made all the right moves on his way to the very pinnacle of the hip-hop game, you may not know the degree to which paranoia has long fuelled Drake. He’s been concerned with his place in the hierarchy, and the according trust issues and suspicions of betrayal at every turn, since the very beginning of his rise: “I really can’t see the end getting any closer/But I’ll probably still be the man when everything is over,” he mused on “Over,” from his 2010 debut album; “I learned Hennessy and enemies is one hell of a mixture,” he considers, on 2011’s “HYFR.” That longstanding paranoia, too, sparked the aggressive rapping Drake that brought us the creative fertility of If You’re Reading This You’re Too Late: “They never told me when you get the crown/It’s gon’ take some getting used to/New friends all in their old feelings now/They don’t love you like they used to.” And yet his desire to be “in it for the long haul,” as he rapped on “6 God,” is at loggerheads with a rap game where the churn at the number one spot is immense and frequent. This isn’t Lear, a king in his winter, suddenly snapping and seeking out enemies to scrap with after a long period of peace; this is a man who has always needed all the praise and has become the king, in part, because of his vain, nervous tics.

Even the first OVO Fests could be viewed now as an act of paranoid power-massing, inviting big-name guests so he could impress his city by association until his own star power was just as mighty. And, to be clear, OVO Fest 2016 proves that his star power now certainly is. For as long as the Sunday ACC crowd shrieked at Rihanna’s arrival on Sunday night and again on Monday, and for as long as Monday’s audience chanted “Yeezy” like a koan when Kanye West appeared as a surprise guest for the third time, the feeling was clear that Drake was the main event. (Indeed, on Monday night, after Kanye left the stage, those “Yeezy” chants quickly turned into “Drizzy” chants.) This development is somewhat new; while he’s always been a charming stage presence, he has not always been able to carry the space of a huge stadium stage alone. But this year’s guest performers appeared for no more than a small clutch of songs, and Future—ostensibly the show’s co-star—was limited to a 25-minute set of his raspiest, most energetic hooks to cede time to Toronto’s very own. In the show’s first half, Drake rattled off a fiery 12-minute set of snatches of chart-topping songs and big-name guest verses, punctuated by a scratch-down of the “0 to 100” lyric “I got all the hits, boy”—and it’s a point well taken.

But OVO Fest’s overriding message of paranoia also sends signals to would-be competitors—both the ones jockeying for his crown in the rap game overall, and for the ones after his throne in Toronto. Just one week before OVO Fest weekend, Tory Lanez—one of the leaders of a so-called New Toronto, widening the lane that Drake opened and taking aim at their forerunner—put on an electric show at the WayHome festival just 90 minutes outside of Toronto and continued his campaign of passive shots at Drake. “Legend has it that when one king falls,” he shouted, dripping with sweat as he perched on the palms of his audience on which he surfed, “another king must rise.” Indeed, his remix of Drake’s “Controlla” leaves the original in the dust. Meek Mill, too, inconveniently refuses to go away, and leaks in Drake’s own camp allowed him to respond to the insults from “Summer Sixteen” minutes before the song was even released. The invaders may not quite be at Drake’s gates, but they’re surely massing up.

So what’s a mega star to do, when rap’s throne is so tenuous and he’s only really just arrived to find attackers on two fronts, including in his own backyard? It’s just as Views‘s first song suggests: Keep the family closer, on a weekend where he now firmly holds a monopoly on the rap world’s attention.

He was teasing and coquettish (“It’s the Six. You deserve to be spoiled”). He was confrontational and urgent (“I didn’t come to play games tonight”). He was possessive and jealous (“Toronto’s giving me loyalty and I don’t got to pay for it,” he ad-libbed during the song “9”). In main surprise guests Kanye and Rihanna, he presented the two artists most important to him, collaborators who both burnish and complement him. In short, OVO Fest 2016’s Drake was an extension of everything he has fashioned his stardom from, and he performed it to two nights of sold-out stadiums—a feeling that was both claustrophobic and communal.

(Photograph by Adrian Lee)

We’re firmly beyond the portion of the Drake era where there’s anything more he’s allowing you to know about him other than through his music. (It’s like he raps: “I do my own propaganda.”) And so OVO Fest 2016 finds the festival becoming the cloistered cathedral for the Six God faithful, the partisans who circle the OVO Fest date like it’s Christmas and accumulate these shows like badges. It’s for them that Drake started off both shows with the hasty introduction “I don’t need to tell you my name and I don’t need to tell you where I’m from, because I say it every five seconds.” It’s for them that Rihanna’s performance was most satisfying, because her long-sought appearance at last after seven years of fests felt, for the audience in the ACC, like completing a collection. It’s for them that Kanye West came back for what now feels like an expected show—which is really pretty remarkable on its own—reminding the city each time of Drake’s place in the rap pantheon. (It’s also them who would be thrilled the most by the news that, as Kanye teased, the pair have a collaborative album in the works.)

So with this year’s OVO Fest, the Six becomes smaller. The paranoid king pulls his coterie in tighter by focussing on his main constituency and his core colleagues. It’s certainly one way to make sure one’s kingdom stays sure, in this summer sixteen of mistrust and suspicion—the emotional fuel that has long proved, and continue to prove, that Drake’s still hungry for more.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/arts/ovo-fest-2016-drake-raps-paranoid-king-shores-up-his-borders/feed/0Dave Eggers returns to where the wild things are—family and naturehttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/dave-eggers-returns-to-where-the-wild-things-are-family-and-nature/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/dave-eggers-returns-to-where-the-wild-things-are-family-and-nature/#respondFri, 29 Jul 2016 18:58:04 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=906775Dave Eggers' exquisite new book finds him back to writing what he knows—though that isn't necessarily a good thing

Scenic view of an RV at the bridge crossing of the Susitna River along the Denali Highway at sunrise, Interior Alaska, Summer. (Design Pics/Alamy)

HEROES OF THE FRONTIER

Dave Eggers

It’s useful to remember that Dave Eggers—the founder of McSweeney’s, a leading purveyor of hipster humour as well as journals, books and magazines—first became a literary hero for obeying that well-worn idiom of writing what he knew. His debut, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, was an inventive memoir that left you cackling about as often as it shredded your heart.

The lyrical Heroes of the Frontier comes three years after Eggers was assailed for The Circle, a dystopian fiction about a world where the strings are being nefariously pulled by a clutch of massive tech conglomerates. After one Silicon Valley memoirist accused him of plagiarism, Eggers made the situation worse by telling the New York Times: “For the most part, [The Circle] was just a process of pure speculative fiction.” He was then decried for being a willing Luddite, tackling something beyond his ken.

So there is a feeling here that Eggers has returned to writing about what he knows in Heroes of the Frontier. Josie, a wayward dentist and mother—fleeing guilt over a family friend’s death, a dental practice lost in a lawsuit and a domestic partner so feeble that “his name necessitated punctuation: Carl?”—packs her children into a rickety RV and embarks on an ill-considered Homeric odyssey from her staid Ohio life into Alaska, chased north by forest fires. Hers is a life escaping one situation for another, and now, in hurtling from the miserable hurry of riven America, Josie and her children find a feral kind of happiness in each other and in unremitting nature.

The novel is, as is Eggers’s tradition, deliciously written, filled with winning quirk. In particular, Josie’s children, Paul and Ana—a preternaturally adult eight-year-old and a preemie hellion aged five, respectively—show Eggers at his best: he has infused the siblings with outlandish yet believable personalities. This is fortunate, as the adventure is more hijinks than high-stakes; the slow reveal of Josie’s past is the narrative engine of the novel’s first half, but the book takes off when it shifts firmly to a focus on the kids. Heroes shines when Eggers shows the infinite ways he can express familial love, in ways that are inventive in their quiet beauty. Paul and Ana are confirmation of Eggers, earnest but never condescending, as potentially our finest chronicler of the condition of being a child.

Readers will likely enjoy this rather straightforward adventure saga more than they did The Circle, in large part because it feels like Eggers has skin in the game. This will be a disappointing response; it’s diminishing to the novel form if writers feel like they should refrain from writing about things they don’t know much about, and their work is only accepted when it hews closely to their identity (and indeed, the escape-to-nature story feels like the purview of the author who is white, male, middle-aged). But it’s also telling that the sense of wonder in Heroes arises not so much from the Alaskan landscape, which gets surprisingly short shrift, but from the characters, protagonists and bit players alike. It’s clear that people are what Eggers really knows.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/dave-eggers-returns-to-where-the-wild-things-are-family-and-nature/feed/0Searching for the Tragically Hip’s mythical Bobcaygeonhttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/arts/searching-for-the-tragically-hips-mythical-bobcaygeon/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/arts/searching-for-the-tragically-hips-mythical-bobcaygeon/#commentsFri, 15 Jul 2016 13:27:30 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=899349The little town that became a CanRock Valhalla isn't entirely the Hip's oasis—but its true beauty reveals itself one star at a time

It’s a bright, sunny June day in Bobcaygeon, Ont.—one of the first beautiful weekends in what this area calls “the season,” as if there is only one, the one that brings the tourists and the cottagers. But the day’s charms are dimmed somewhat for Kathleen Seymour-Fagan, whose attention is focused on a different light, one that has lingered at red for too long, allowing cars to inch over a bridge in fits and starts.

“They really need to fix the traffic lights,” she says, squinting as a line of cars waits to cross the bridge, one of two entryways into town. The Bobcaygeon councillor for the City of Kawartha Lakes—the town was amalgamated in 2001, hoovering up six villages and the town of Lindsay—has other things on her mind, too: there are provincially mandated growth rates to meet, costs to maintain. Even the limestone upon which the town is built is causing trouble, creating potholes and sinkholes.

If this all seems like any other small town—well, it is. But it also isn’t, because this is Bobcaygeon: a town woven into the fabric of the Canadian imagination by the Tragically Hip. It was in “Bobcaygeon” that a little town a two-hour drive from Toronto at the mouth of a mighty lock system that spiders between two Great Lakes became the idealization of a small-town getaway, and a kind of CanRock Valhalla. It was in “Bobcaygeon” where the Hip arguably reached the peak of their powers—and, as the band embarks on one final tour later this month, in the wake of frontman Gord Downie’s diagnosis of terminal brain cancer, it is a town pausing to consider what it all means.

“I’ll be driving in, and it’ll be a beautiful night, and that song comes on,” says Seymour-Fagan. “And it’s like . . . yeah.” She lets out a wistful sigh.

That song. All minor chords and major lifts, “Bobcaygeon,” the anthem from the Hip’s 1998 album Phantom Power, has become one of the iconic Canadian band’s signature tracks. In it, Downie’s protagonist—an OPP officer, in the music video—leaves a house in Bobcaygeon, blurred by country music and wine, and returns to Toronto, with its despair-inducing job, its dull, “hypothetical” sky, its riots. So he returns to that Bobcaygeon home, where he begins to breathe easy again and slowly unspool his stresses. It’s a paean to a simpler life, the kind of comfortable myth that a country as spacious and folksy as Canada likes to tell itself.

It’s not the first time that Bobcaygeon has tapped into Canada’s cultural wellspring. Local legend and diary entries say that four hundred years ago, New France’s iconic founder Samuel de Champlain strode through, collaborating with the Huron and Algonquin on what would be a failed raid on the Iroquois. He was struck by the verdant area—in his diary, he called it beaubocage, meaning beautiful woodland and heath—a word that found itself in its name. In the 1830s, it was settled by migrants from England, Ireland and Scotland; it once served as the home office for the Boyd Lumber Company’s North American operations, which had supplied timber to the British Navy. And the town, too, became the first anchor point of the Trent-Severn Waterway, a marvellous 386 km stretch of modern engineering, connecting Lake Huron and Lake Ontario. And if you’re looking for a houseboat, look no further; it is the province’s houseboat capital.

But if Canadians know of the little village of Bobcaygeon at all, odds are it’s because of the Tragically Hip’s song.

Young couple on Main Street looking out on Lock 32, Trent-Severn Waterway, toward Bigley’s. (Photograph by Stephanie Noritz)

“It did a lot of good for the town—it put Bobcaygeon on the map,” said Terri MacKay, an employee at Bigley’s, the town’s family-run retail engine, a sprawling palace that stacks shoes and swimwear the same way your favourite bookstore crams paperbacks to the rafters. It’s humming this weekend; there’s a sale on at the store, which promises “big city fashion in a cottage country atmosphere.”

“There’s a sense of pride—and thinking about Gord Downie, I get a bit weepy,” MacKay says, admitting she is a few notches down from super fandom. Her co-worker Clay Craig agrees: “It’s going to be a loss when that man goes.”

“The song sort of sealed the deal for us,” said Sacha Douglas, 41. She and her husband Bill moved here after 15 years in Toronto and started Douglas + Son four years ago; hawking vintage industrial wares and a charmingly salvaged aesthetic, the shop would be at home in one of Toronto’s hippest hoods. “It would fly in Toronto, for sure,” she says. “We were choosing between a bunch of different places, but I feel like here, we got the inside track.”

The Hip surely helped their choice. “There was something about the lore of Bobcaygeon. The song brings so many people into town.” Her husband’s a diehard, who knows every lyric. But is she a Hip fan? “Well, as much as every Canadian is,” she says.

Interior of Douglas + Son store in Bobcaygeon. (Photograph by Adrian Lee)

“Not a lot of people ask for ‘Bobcaygeon,’ ” admits Merle Gibson, a jovial 60-year-old who has hosted a sleepy karaoke night at the local legion for the last 500 or so Fridays. Here, regulars bring their own CDs from home, and the rules printed on the song binders deliver karaoke commandments—“thou shall not twist and shout louder than the singer,” “thou shall not start a fight.” Indeed, “Bobcaygeon” is not among the 12 Tragically Hip songs listed in the binders, but Gibson insists he has it in his stacks; he says someone requests it about three times a year.

There’s something a bit fitting that for many in Bobcaygeon, the relationship to the song is somewhat hypothetical, like the Big Smoke’s skies. After all, Downie himself has admitted he didn’t choose the town for any specific reason. “You could use any small town, really,” he said in 1998. “Bobcaygeon rhymes with constellation . . . sort of.” (Representatives of the Tragically Hip did not respond to requests for comment.)

“There really isn’t a romantic, beautiful reason they wrote that song as far as I can tell, and as far as we talked about it,” said Andy Keen, who directed Bobcaygeon, a concert doc about the Hip’s sold-out show there in 2011—a Heritage Moment equivalent of Roger Waters playing The Wall in Berlin. Keen and crew interviewed roughly 25 locals—and although they appreciated the song, “they were a people who didn’t really have too much of a relationship with it. It became this soundtrack for them, but also for so much of cottage country in this province and this country.”

Indeed, even if it resonates widely, the Hip’s mythical Bobcaygeon no longer quite exists, if it ever really did. It’s not a place that offers a clean break from Toronto—these days, it’s a town infused with the big city.

Just last year, Douglas’s well-attired Toronto-feeling shop moved from the edge of town to its marquee spot on the main strip, next to the Foodland. Port 32, an outcropping of luxury retirement homes, has begun to pop up near the legion. Recently, shops offering up big-city buzzwords have joined the generally pun-filled retail offerings: an artisanal grilled-cheese sandwich store and a Mexican-themed organic direct-trade coffee shop alongside a fish-and-chips restaurant called Just for the Halibut, as well as Cajun Tanz, a curious cottage-country mix of a tanning salon and electronics store. Kawartha Lakes’ latest tourism data says 1.1 million visits generate nearly $90 million in spending, with a desire to grow that number by offering “authentic Ontario rural experiences.” In that context, the city’s tourism planning document calls Bobcaygeon, a town of roughly 3,500, an “urban centre.”

“It was a bit closed before—a little bit of a rural community. But it’s really become a hub and a hotspot,” says Seymour-Fagan, a born-and-raised Torontonian who moved to Bobcaygeon 15 years ago and started that organic coffee shop five years after that.

“People moving in from Toronto? I think it’s great. The locals, do they think it’s great? I think they’re kind of used to it now,” she says. “They realize that they’re electricians, fixers, that’s their bread and butter. They realize otherwise, there’s not much here.”

It wasn’t always so peaceable. Seymour-Fagan remembers cottaging near Bobcaygeon growing up, and how locals and cottagers would fight “almost every day” at a bar called the Doctor’s Office. Brian Junkin, a Bobcaygeon lifer and a Kawartha Lakes councillor representing the northern, sparser portion of the town, remembers the troubled ’70s and ’80s, when the town’s population spiked and locals were getting nervous. “Some young people from the GTA came up and were camped along the Little Bob River,” he says with a little laugh. “Some of the local fellows went down and ran them out of town.”

But even Junkin, the fifth generation to live on his Bobcaygeon family farm, favours more development and growth. “It’s changed a lot since I was very small, and there were growth pains for a while, but we definitely accept the summer visitors and the influx of retirees—it’s a good thing. There will be more development in Bobcaygeon. And I haven’t heard anything [about it] from people in my ward, not in my time on council.”

But frustrations do still bubble. Longtime residents like Gibson take issue with an amalgamated city they see as sapping towns of their successes to patch up tougher-luck places. “They take our best fire trucks, take them to Lindsay. That was our blood, sweat and tears that went into it, but that’s amalgamation—ruined it for the locals,” says Gibson. Sewage and power bills are higher than ever before; on the main bridge, a sign splashed in urgent red calls for a peaceful protest over Hydro One costs: “ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! CAN YOU HEAR US NOW?”

Bobcaygeon, that small town of CanRock legend, is a real place; with reality comes real issues. It’s not the simple paradise offering a clean break from the big city; it’s a place still working through its own identity, with all the mundane stresses of rising bills and the desire to be better—and bigger—than it already is.

But even if Downie didn’t intend it, there’s still something truthful about the song. “It’s a warm bunch there, and a beautiful place,” said Keen, who says the people he spoke to for his film still keep in touch. “They’re just proud. But are they proud because of the Hip song? I think that’s just in addition to being proud of their town.”

And that becomes truer, as you drive away at night from the unhurried traffic light and the town behind you, turn off by the legion and the retirement homes, and pull onto Highway 36, looking up at the diamond-encrusted dark. “I was sitting out just last night on my deck looking at it,” said the longtime local Junkin. “It’s beautiful,” says Douglas, the shopowner. “It really is, coming from the city, you don’t see stars until you come up here—and now every night, I come on the balcony, it’s beautiful, and it’s true,” says Seymour-Fagan. “Everyone’s really happy here. Even if you have to wait a long time for the [traffic] light.”

In the coming months, Seymour-Fagan says she’ll put forward a motion at Kawartha Lakes council to rename a Bobcaygeon street after the Tragically Hip. They’ll put something on the sign welcoming people to town, too, she says. “Where the constellations reveal themselves one star at a time,” she thinks.

The Tenors perform during the 25th anniversary celebration of the Rick Hansen Man in Motion relay in Vancouver, B.C., on Tuesday, May 22, 2012. The Tenors changed some of the lyrics of O Canada as they made a political statement while singing the national anthem at Tuesday night’s MLB all-star game. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jonathan Hayward

Remember that whole months-long political brawl to change two words in the Canadian anthem? The fight that Mauril Belanger, the longtime member of Parliament dying of ALS, has devoted his days to? You know, the surprisingly intractable fight over changing “all thy sons command” to “all of us command,” to perhaps consider the 18,075,100 Canadians who identify as women?

Well, the Tenors didn’t. They see that argument and raise you a totally bonus inflammatory banner in another heated political debate, with millions of eyes on them.

So here’s what happened: The Tenors, a vocal quartet from Victoria who perform in the vanilla, operatic style of Josh Groban but who, combined among the four of them, lack his charms, were asked to perform the Canadian anthem at Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game. It’s a prosaic job, best done prosaically: all you’re asked to do, and what is expected of you, is to sing a note-for-note, word-for-word performance of the anthem. Straying from that tried-and-true format is how you find yourself on Sportsnet’s blooper reels.

In place of the lyrics “With glowing hearts we see thee rise, The True North strong and free,” the group sang instead: “We’re all brothers and sisters / All lives matter to the great,” raising a marker-scrawled sign “All Lives Matter,” before returning to the standard lyrics in French. (A note of pity here for Michael Saunders, the Toronto Blue Jays’ Canadian-born outfielder, who stared blankly into the sun as the camera panned to him during this moment.)

Let’s leave aside what they could have meant by “to the great,” and take a moment to explain why the statement “All Lives Matter” alone here is thoughtless, at best. As a dismissal, or even a response to the statement “Black Lives Matter”—a movement and rallying cry for black communities in America, Canada and beyond who have witnessed, experienced and felt acts of discrimination (both overt and subtle) and are refusing to accept societal norms that have produced police brutality and other acts of violence—it is unworthy. It is a statement that salves the oppressor; it is a sentence that erases the pain by equating that pain to that which is experienced by everyone. It is, as the popular argument goes, the equivalent of telling a neighbour whose house is on fire that all houses matter. It is, as my colleague Jason Markusoff noted on Twitter, the rhetorical equivalent of interrupting those solemnly pausing on Remembrance Day to say “Never forget” with a haughty “No, it should be ‘Never forget all genocides.’ ” Never mind that taking vitriolic offence to the brusque response one often receives to “all lives matter” takes away from the actual issues at hand. “All Lives Matter” is, at best, unhelpful because it refuses to acknowledge that people are different, and some people are hurting right now.

Some may point to U.S. President Barack Obama’s more diplomatic note at the recent NATO summit in Warsaw: “When people say ‘black lives matter,’ that doesn’t mean blue lives don’t matter. That just means all lives matter.” This, it’s worth noting, is a different point than merely saying “All Lives Matter.” That’s because saying “Black Lives Matter” does not mean “only black lives matter”; that’s a flawed premise too, and it’s a defensive reading that refuses to acknowledge that those lives actually do. The conceit of “Black Lives Matter” is about focus, and not about exclusion; the reality that most of North American society has focused expressly on lives that are not black makes this urgent, and makes “All Lives Matter” particularly cruel.

So, back to the Tenors. What does this tell us? We have no statement yet from the group, who likely thought they were doing the right thing by making a political statement. (Update: at 10:10 p.m., the Tenors’ Twitter account released an apologetic statement blaming the act on “lone wolf” tenor Remigio Pereira; Pereira, who “will not be performing with the Tenors until further notice,” also sent a response through his own Facebook account.) And also, it is worth saying that co-opting an entire country’s anthem to make a personal point is, to say the least, selfish and unthinkable.

But here’s what we do know: at the end of the day, despite political efforts in Parliament and productive debate and worthy protests in the street and splashy headlines and deep coverage—a group (or one lone wolf) can still decide to stride onto national TV and change up a national anthem on their terms.

And they didn’t even sing “all of us command.”

Just in case you’ve forgotten, here’s the Barenaked Ladies performing the old 2015 anthem from our Canada 148 project, to show you how it’s done.

Time has changed Darryl McDaniels. To be fair, that’s true of anyone who’s been in the cultural eye for as long as he has: as one of the trio that formed ’80s hip-hop icons Run-DMC, alongside with Joe “Run” Simmons and the late Jason “Jam-Master Jay” Mizell, he’s been famous for a big chunk of his young-looking 52 years. But these days, he’s not quite the rugged-voiced Devastating Mic Controller that arguably launched rap music into the mainstream. He’s living in comfy Wayne, N.J., now, not the Hollis, Queens, neighbourhood his group made iconic (“but I’m close by,” he insists, with a laugh); he sounds a bit hoarser, even after he recovered from the voice disorder that nearly sapped his booming tenor; he’s become a big fan of Canadian soft-rock singer Sarah McLachlan. (Read our exclusive excerpt of his new memoir, Ten Ways Not to Commit Suicide, to find out why.)

In this instance, though, time has changed McDaniels most of all in his understanding of himself. During his days as a stage-storming rapper, he became dependent on prescription drugs and alcohol—drinking an entire case of 40 oz. Olde English beers every day—which led him down a path of deep depression. He struggled to have his voice heard in what was quickly becoming the most famous rap group in the world—first figuratively, amid stronger personalities, then literally, after his voice gave out. And then, in the midst of his lowest lows, he learned a fact that shook his world: he was actually adopted. Now, having tracked down his birth mother and sought out therapy, he’s working with others with mental-health and addiction issues.

But here’s one thing that certainly hasn’t changed: McDaniels is still loquacious, rattling off rhymes in interviews and even finding a way to make the hardest words mellifluous. “No one asked me, ‘D, are you okay?’ ” he told Maclean’s in an interview that more than doubled its prescribed time. “I would’ve said, ‘Oh, you wanna know? I’m an alcoholic, suicidal, metaphysical, spiritual wreck that’s about to shoot people up in the mall and then go commit suicide.’ ”

So he’s certainly still as raw as ever. It’s just a different kind of raw. So in the style of his new book, here are 10 booming McDaniels commandments from that interview with Maclean’s on, from growing up in the heady early days of hip-hop, to how his personal demons manifested—and were eventually overcome.

1. On how hip-hop was similar to his love for comic books

“On ‘King of Rock,’ when Run said, ‘I’m DJ Run, I can scratch,’ I didn’t say ‘I’m DMC, I can rap.’ I said, ‘I’m DMC, I can draw,’ ‘cause all I did was read comic books and draw. For me, hip hop allowed me to tell the world all my geeky corny stuff. I go to school! Everything that I always rapped about was everyday stuff that the gangster and the Harvard student goes through, the poor person and the rich person. The beautiful thing about when hip hop first came, I read comic books and read the encyclopedia and I loved to read and write and draw, so when hip hop came my way I was just writing rhymes in my book ‘cause it was fun.

“When hip hop came along, it was just me make-believing I’m this guy that’s gonna be as great as Melle Mel and Kool Moe Dee and these guys—it was just make-believe. The same way I used to pretend I was Batman and Superman in my house with a blanket around my neck was the same way I was just writing these rhymes and going down to the basement on me and my brother’s DJ equipment pretending to be Grandmaster Flash. But I was doing that over and over and over and over and over and over, and when it got to the point where it was time to do the first album, then it was time to do a video, then it was time to get up on stage, I was just make-believing my whole persona. It came from me saying this, like it was a comic-book dream: ‘I am the most powerful entity in the pop universe.’

“Marvel Comics taught me something amazing. The titles of the characters were the Amazing Spiderman, the Incredible Hulk, the Invincible Iron Man. So these comic books taught me to use an adjective to describe your power and then say who you are. So on my first records I said, ‘Ima be the devastating mic controller, DMC. I’m gonna be the microphone master DMC.’ Thor is the son of Odin from this mythical, royal, majestic kingdom called Asgard from this line of gods. He had wealth and riches. So then I wrote the rhyme, ‘I’m the son of Byford, brother of Al / Banna’s my mother and Run’s my pal / It’s McDaniels not McDonald’s / These rhymes are Darryl’s, those burgers are Ronald’s / I ran down my family tree / my mother my father my brother and me.’ I was coming up with all these characters and personifications to give me confidence and when I heard a certain beat, I said, ‘I’m gonna be like the Hulk on this one, I’m gonna be like Spiderman on this one, what would Iron Man do in this adventure?’

“It got overwhelming when it became a thing, like, ‘You gotta go out there and deliver because.’ I needed the extra boost of confidence because now it’s getting competitive and now Run and Jay is worried and now there’s a lot of pressure. I’ve gotta show up. The thing that made me feel good without even having to use my imagination was just a sip of that Olde English over there. So imagine that. All I was doing was shows, so all I was doing was drinking before the show and then after the show. That’s how the alcohol became my confidence.”

2. On why he wasn’t actually that excited when Run-DMC got signed to a record label

“I didn’t care. I remember I hated going to sign the deal—I remember when we got signed to Profile, me and Run had to get on the damn bus, get on the subway and go to some f–king lawyer’s office at 6:30 p.m. on a f–king school night. The rap s–t was ruining my life even back then! I need to be home doing my projects. 6:30! That means I’m not gonna get home till 9:30, then I gotta get up at 6 a.m. to be at the bus stop by 6:30 to take three busses and two trains to make it to Rice High School. That s–t was ruining my life back then and I didn’t realize it.

“I was actually in the lunch room at St. John’s University when ‘Sucker MCs’ came on in the cafeteria and the whole lunch room jumps up: ‘Oh my God, who are these guys?! Who are these Run-DMC guys?’ And I didn’t get up and say, ‘That’s me!’ The day they played Run-DMC on the radio, to me, it was, ‘Yes! It’s done! That’s the end!’ I didn’t know all this other stuff was gonna happen.

“So for me it was like, Run saw I had a skill, something that he could use. So he was like, ‘Yo D, here’s the beat, let’s do this record. D, help me rock ‘It’s Like That.’ OK, we gonna do this album, what rhymes you got?’ I used to walk in the studio, Russell [Simmons, Joe’s brother and the iconic founder of Def Jam] used to say, ‘What rhymes you got? OK, put that record on there.’ So for me it was fun, it was recreational for me, to be able to sit there and write.

“I wrote my rhymes on ‘Sucker MCs’ when I graduated Rice High School. It was, ‘Oh shoot, I got accepted to St. John’s University,’ and then I went right to my room and wrote, ‘I’m DMC / in the place to be.’ When Run did bring me to the studio to finally record with him, I wasn’t even supposed to be on ‘Sucker MCs’. Run had this whole record written—’Sucker MCs’—but ‘It’s Like That’ was more of a record that was, you know, like ‘The Message’ and ‘Planet Rock,’ so Russ was like, ‘This is gonna be the single.’ Because originally ‘Sucker MCs’ was gonna be Joe’s first record by himself, so Russ was gonna make this ‘It’s Like That’ new record, the socially conscious record. That’s why if you listen to ‘Sucker MCs,’ Run rhymes three times.

“But Run says to me, ‘D go in there and put one of your new rhymes on the record.’ I’m looking at Run in the studio, ‘Motherf–ker it’s 2 a.m., I didn’t even tell my mother I’m here!’ I’m all the way in the city of Manhattan in the Green Street recording studio in some basement in f–kin’ Soho. When Run came and picked me up at 2 p.m. on a Sunday I said, ‘Ma, I’ll be home later, I’m going to Joe’s house.’ I didn’t say I was going there.

“So I go in there and I say, ‘Let me say my new rhyme.’ And I always tell kids, I just made a rhyme about going to school! I made a rhyme: ‘I like eating chicken and collard greens.’ They all laugh and stuff like that. So for me I was just saying what I was doing. I didn’t write rhymes for records. Run discovered I had all these motherf–kin’ rhymes and was like, ‘Yo, this is a goldmine!’ ”

Run DMC performing at the “Made In America” music festival on Sunday Sept. 2, 2012, in Philadelphia. (Photo by Drew Gurian/Invision/AP)

3. On how he found out he was adopted

“When I was gonna kill myself, I said, ‘I’m depressed.’ And people were telling me, ‘how you gonna be depressed, you’re DMC!’ But all that fortune and fame is bulls–t, that s–t don’t mean nothing. It’s only good if it’s fun, but it don’t mean nothing for the soul, or for your life, and for you as a person. So I was like, ‘OK, if I do die tomorrow, people will know the DMC story, there were two books written on us, there’s a Behind the Music, you can Wikipedia my ass, whatever whatever. But just in case I do die, I want people to know the little boy Darryl.’ In the book I wanna say, ‘Yo, what’s up world, I’m DMC, you know from the groundbreaking group Run-DMC First to go gold, first to go platinum, first on the cover of Rolling Stone, first everything that people do in hip hop, they say is because of me, Run, and Jay—but I’m really just Darryl McDaniels from Hollis, Queen’s, New York. I’m no different from any other little boy or girl on this earth who was born May 31, 1964.’

“I knew my birthday but I didn’t know no details. So I called my moms up: ‘Yo mom I’m writing a book: how much did I weigh, what time I was born, what hospital?’ She told me those things, hung up the phone. An hour later, she calls back with my father and basically says, ‘Hey son! We have something else to tell you.’

” ‘OK, shoot.’

” ‘Well you was a month old when we brought you home and you’re adopted but we love you, bye.’ It was almost like the gods, the mighty one, Yahweh, Buddha, the Almighty, whatever you want to call him or her, it was almost like, ‘Oh, he’s gonna kill himself! We’ve gotta reveal to him his secret!’ And it was revealed to me that my whole life as DMC I’ve been living my story from chapter two of my story. I thought it all started in Hollis, Queens, New York. Son, you have no idea. And that revelation—you’re adopted—OK that’s why I had these funny feelings and I didn’t know what that was, and once I received those feelings, everything about why I drank, why I act the way I act, why I had to wait 30-some-odd years to learn my truths, it all made sense.”

4. On dropping hints about his alcoholism on Run-DMC records

“If you listen to Back From Hell [Run DMC’s 1990 album, widely seen as a disaster], on all of those records I’m f–kin’ pissy f–kin’ drunk. I did the rhyme: ‘I got to pee / I got to pee upon a tree, right / I got to pee, I got to pee upon a tree / I pee upon a tree because I drink too much Olde E / Now it’s time for the pee to come out of me / So I go and pee, I go and pee upon a tree, right / I go and pee, I go and pee upon a tree / There’s people that walk by and say, ‘Hey that’s DMC!’ and I look and say, ‘No no, it is not me.’

‘You know on ‘The Ave.’, from Back From Hell, I talked about my alcoholism. I said, ‘Sometimes I whine when I’m crying broke,’ and Joe thought that’s the deffest line ever because when I say ‘sometimes I whine’ he thought I meant not crying. What I meant was they had 99-cent bottles of wine at the liquor store, Night Train, and when we was broke when we couldn’t get Bacardi or vodka and coke, we would go get 99 pennies and go get Night Train wine.

“Back from Hell was cra-f–kin-zy. Back from Hell, that’s when I put a refrigerator in my truck so that I didn’t have to stop at the grocery store to buy 40s. I would wake up in the morning and go get a case. Twelve 40-oz bottles in a case and I would put it in the refrigerator in my truck and I would drink all day and then I would go out with Jay at nighttime, we’d go to the clubs. During the day, it was Olde English all day then I would go out to the club and drink. Back in the day it was Screwdrivers—vodka and orange juice—and rum and coke, and I would do that until three or four in the morning, go home at five, sleep till 8 o’clock, get up and start doing it all over again. From ’88 is when it got crazy. From ’88 to ’91, 24/7 drinking, acute pancreatitis, the doctor tells me, ‘You have two choices: you can drink and die or not drink and live.’ So I went cold turkey for nine years and then when I found out that I was adopted I started drinking again for four years and then I realized that I gotta help myself and that’s when I helped myself.’ ”

5. On how men refuse to admit they don’t need mental health help

“That’s the masculine thing to do. They think it’s the cool thing to do, instead of saying, ‘I need help.’ The first thing you’ve got to say is ‘I need help.’ It took me sitting there after drinking a whole fifth of Remi Martin or Jack Daniels—I forgot which one it was—‘cause my wife was telling me, ‘D, you need to go to rehab,’ for four years. ‘D, you need to go to rehab.’ But I said, ‘No I’m all right.’ ‘Cause I was a functional drunk, but no, D: you f–kin’ killin yourself. It took me to say, ‘OK I need to go to rehab’. And it took me to say, ‘After rehab I still need therapy.’ And it took me to say, ‘It’s OK to cry.’ It took me to say, ‘It’s OK to feel the way I feel and then express the way I feel.’ So it’s a problem with men but even more for black men. It’s a big issue. But even all men, in age and culture. In all of our cultures, there’s stupid things that us men do because we think it’s the masculine man thing to do, not realizing we are destroying our very universe. I don’t see myself as political or religious but a lot of what is in my book can be applied to areas outside of sobriety and substance abuse and depression. Being truthful. You feel it. You feel it and you know the truth.

“Now people ask me to talk to people they know. I’m at the gym and a guy from the fire department comes up to me and he’s like, ‘Yo DMC, can you come by the firehouse and talk to some of the firemen?’ And I was like, ‘Why, is somebody there adopted?’ And he says no, all of these firemen and policemen are f–king abusing substances ‘cause life is f–ked up for them; they going through stuff. So it was a thing where because men don’t go to therapy, they’ll let DMC be the therapist, you know what I’m saying? And that started making sense for me.”

6. On the difference between rap in 1980 and in 2016

“The OGs need to hear the young Gs, and the young Gs need to listen to the OGs and then we take the young Gs’ and OGs’ ideas, concepts, images, put them together, present it to the world and we’ll have change, we’ll have elevation, we’ll have transformation. We don’t have that no more. We just got a lot of motherf–kers doing hip hop right now. But when we was doing it, one thing gave birth to another. ‘The Message,’ ‘Planet Rock,’ ‘The Breaks,’ ‘Rock Box,’ Public Enemy, LL Cool J, De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest. It was growth, and it was transformative. Now it’s just a bunch of people doing the same thing. We need those differences. And even if it’s going to be very hardcore street, you know, when you listen to Scarface, his rhyme on ‘Mind Playing Tricks on Me’, wasn’t saying, ‘Yo, praise me and glorify me ‘cause I’m a drug dealer getting a lot of money f–kin’ up your neighbourhood. It was, ‘At night I can’t sleep lord, I don’t wanna be doing this, there’s gotta be another way, this isn’t the life.’ That was the power of hip hop. The drug dealer, the gangbanger didn’t say, ‘Yo, it’s cool to do this.’ It was like, ‘Man, there’s gotta be another way.’ And once we found out that other way we put it on a record.”

7. On being competitive in rap music

“Throughout the ’90s and throughout the 2000s when hip hop was changing, I had lyrics that would f–kin’ put a f–kin’ foot in all of these MCs’ mouths, all of our competition’s mouth. I had a song called ‘Chill With a Mil’ and ‘You Still Got Beef’ way before Biggie had ‘Mo’ Money Mo’ Problems.’ Run-DMC, we were the kings, we selling out the big tours, we got the sneaker deals, now all of a sudden they sayin’ we soft? And we sold out? Yeah, you know we got the ‘Walk This Way,’ we got ‘Mary, Mary’ songs, but y’all forgetting motherf–kers we had ‘Here We Go,’ we had ‘Party People’—’Your dreams have now been fulfilled.’

“Throughout our career we always wrote records that would let people know, ‘Yeah we may be this pop commercial group but motherf–ker, we can take all this s–t right to the park right now and destroy all y’all.’ Even when ‘Walk This Way’ was out, when Big Daddy Kane came out, Run used to come to me saying, ‘Public Enemy is better than us!’ Then later, Run would be like, ‘Don’t say this or that, don’t hang with LL Cool J, LL’s trying to read your mind and steal our ideas.’ My whole career, I always liked everybody else except me. I didn’t care about what I did.”

8. On the Drake vs. Meek Mill beef

“Yes, I followed that—hell yeah! But see, our thing was different. See, I always addressed everyone around us in my songs. In ’85 when all of these new guys was coming up around us, I don’t wanna be the king of rap. Who wants to be the king of y’all motherf–kers? Y’all ain’t important. I want to be the king of Elvis, I wanna be the king of Hendrix, I wanna be the king of the Rolling Stones. So I wrote a rhyme: ‘The King of Rock / there is none higher.’

“And then when I did my rhymes on ‘Hit It Run’: ‘Born to rock around the clock / You can’t say I’m not / And in case you forgot,’ you know what I’m saying? ‘Cause King of Rock was ’85, we in ’86 now and all these MCs like KRS-One was throwing shots at us. People were throwing shots left and right, EPMD was throwing shots in their lyrics. So I went back to the b-boy street s–t, f–k this record s–t. I’m a child of the cassette tapes before ‘Rapper’s Delight’ was even recorded. I come from the era when Melle Mel rhymed liked me. I rhyme like this ‘cause of Melle Mel. See y’all motherf–kers only know Melle Mel from ‘The Message,’ I know Melle Mel from when he had an echo chamber, and Flash was dropping Apache. So when I did ‘I’m the devastating mic controller DMC / And can’t nobody mess around with me.’ Then I said this, ‘I’m the king of rock, rap, and of rhyme,’ ‘cause this guy was like, ‘I’m the king of rhyme.’ Motherf–ker, I’m the king of rock, rap, and of rhyme. At first I didn’t want to come down to their level. But let’s say I’m the king of rock, rap, and I’m the king of it all. So I would do, ‘Do you really believe what’s going on / I was conceived and I was born / I once was lost but now I’m found / Tell your bunch I’m boss, I run this town / I leave all suckers in the dust and of course you dumb motherf–kers can’t mess with us.’ Yo come on, you know what I’m saying? So I was always prepared at every level at every year for all of that and, like I said, I had so much stuff when it all started to change and we were famous. I was like, ‘F–k this famous s–t. This s–t is bedroom, basement, street, block party fun, and I was always armed. But what had happened is what I say in the book. I would come with ideas and run ’em and Jay would say, ‘No, we ain’t doin’ that,’ and I would be like, ‘OK,’ you know what I’m saying? Sitting there smiling in their face when inside I was hurt.”

9. On rap beefs, and similar creative outlets, being healthy

“A lot of the foster kids I deal with ain’t violent kids. What happens is this: they got something they need to talk about, they got something that they need to release, so, because they’re not getting that opportunity they lash out violently against others. You know, the kids that’s always fighting and punching and stabbing and hurting other kids, there’s something that you go, ‘Yo what’s wrong with you, man? You can laugh, you can cry, what is it?’ I always go one-on-one when I go to speak with these kids, too. ‘Who are you? What do you want to do? What’s your dream? What’s your desire?’ Now if you don’t want to lash out and hurt people—a lot of people don’t want to hurt other people, I was one of those guys. I felt like I wanted to go to the mall with a gun, but I didn’t want to hurt nobody, I didn’t want to hurt myself.

“See, you got three options: You lash out violently to hurt others, if you don’t want to hurt others you hurt yourself. How do you hurt yourself? You abuse substances, you use drugs, you go sleep with everybody. If you’re not into that, if that don’t give you enough high, you cut yourself. I’m mentoring a girl here in Wayne at the School of Rock who continually cuts herself. Then I discovered that she writes poetry and draws, but she actually thought drawing wasn’t cool. I was like, ‘I draw,’ and she said, ‘You do?’ And so now she draws instead of cutting herself.

“But if you don’t want to hurt anybody else, if you don’t want to hurt yourself, your last option is suicide. Let me OD on the pills, let me slit my wrists, let me jump off the building. I was at that one. I didn’t want to punch Jay and Joe in the face when they disappointed me. I wasn’t gonna go hang myself because this record s–t ain’t that important. But my only solution was, ‘I don’t wanna live no more.’ When I look at my career, every decision that went wrong was somebody else’s decision that I had no say in—but I followed along. It didn’t have to happen, that’s why in the book you never hear me say, ‘Run did this.’ No. S–t happened, here’s what Run did, here’s what I did. What I did was wrong.

“For me, art was healthy and it goes all the way back to me writing rhymes. I didn’t write rhymes ‘cause Run wanted to put me in the group. I had books and books of rhymes when he walked into my basement. It was healthy for me to talk about my mother being a nurse and my father working in transit all those years. It was just in my book, not for anybody to see—but it was healthy for me.”

10. On what is lost because rap is a young person’s game

“In my show before I do ‘Walk This Way,’ I do a whole routine about that. ‘Y’all motherf–kers don’t tell Bruce Springsteen that he’s 60 years old and he can’t do rock’n’roll anymore.’ And what this industry don’t know is, we should learn from the kids, but the kids need to learn from us too. The more you do something the better you get at it. So think about this, you got these young kids coming out having these big hit records, two and three years go by and nobody wanna hear their music anymore. With what I did at 18, I can still get on stage right now and a kid that was born yesterday will think it’s new.

“There’s a big lack of respect for the elders in hip hop. To the point that I can walk into the local rap station, but here’s the difference. If you go in the rock station and they’re sitting there interviewing David Grohl, and you know how in a radio station you have the control room and you got the big glass window, right? So David Grohl is on the air, primetime, getting interviewed and David Grohl and the DJ sees Neil Young walk by? They would go, ‘Stop!’ The DJ will say stop and David Grohl would say, ‘Mr. Young, you gotta come here and sit down.’ But if DMC walks by, and they’re interviewing Lil’ Wayne, they’ll go, ‘Oh DMC just walked by, he’s a legend.’ And then they’ll keep going on as opposed to bringing me in and exposing me to that.

“See, when I walk into a room and I’m introduced to a kid, he sees me now at 50 and says, ‘This dude made that “Sucker MCs” record 30 years ago.’ But he needs to know—play this record now and let him know—they don’t even address who I am now. ‘I made that record when I was your age homey!’ There’s not a generation gap, it’s an information gap. There’s no respect for the elders of hip hop. ‘Yeah, we respect them, it’s cool, they used to do…’ Motherf–ker, I don’t ‘used to do’ hip-hop! I was at a gas station one time and a white kid about maybe 20 years old came up to me, I mean he was mesmerized, he wanted a picture and an autograph, but this was his words: ‘Oh my god! You used to be Run-DMC.’ I was like, ‘I just got back from doing a show in Dubai!’

“Our media, our hip hop media, doesn’t do the justice that rock, classic, jazz, and all the other genres of music do. What I mean by that is: if Neil Young come out with an album next year, he’s gonna get the cover of all these rock magazines and when you open up the article it’s gonna be six to ten pages on what he used to do, what he’s done lately, and what he’s about to do. Nowadays, if Melle Mel drops a record, it’s on page 203 at the end under all the f–kin’ ads, ‘Melle Mel’s going on tour.’ I don’t do interviews about Run-DMC being in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, because everybody thinks we’re the first rappers. I’ll be at events and they’ll say, ‘They were the first rap act to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.’ No, stop. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five because of ‘The Message’ was the first rap group to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which is the most incredible thing ever in the f–king history of music and Chuck D [from Public Enemy] said it was a f–kin’ blip in hip hop and black media. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five shoulda had every cover, they shoulda been on every f–kin’ variety show, interview show, f–kin’ Source, XXL. MTV shoulda f–kin gave them the f–kin week of where they come from, but there’s no respect for that ‘cause they didn’t do nothing.

“It’s not about paying tribute. Nobody gotta do anything. This is what needs to happen: the same way you got a Rock on the Range festival, the same way you got rappers going to Coachella, we need a three-day hip hop festival that starts with everybody from Kool Herc to everybody now. So you can include the majority of the great acts that did change the world, get family-inclusive music. You can go bring your sons and your daughters and your grandmother to a Naughty by Nature show. You might hear an F-word here or there but musically, you know what I’m saying? We need a three-day festival that shows Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Treacherous Three, Kurtis Blow. ’80s, ’90s, all the way up to now. We at that point that we can do that. Me and Chuck D are about to go to all of our boys and say, ‘We gonna do this, and we gonna do it with the same integrity that Sarah McLachlan did when she did Lilith Fair.’ ”

Oklahoma City Thunder’s Kevin Durant (35) and head coach Billy Donovan stand next to each other in the closing minutes of the second half in Game 5 of the NBA basketball Western Conference finals Thursday, May 26, 2016, in Oakland, Calif. Golden State won 120-111. (Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP)

A superstar basketball player comes to a decision point in his career, in his growth as a person. He defers and hems about the difficulty of his choice before announcing that he’s “decided” to leave the championship-less town that he says raised him—announcing his independence from the city either figuratively, or literally, on his and America’s Independence Day.

Meanwhile, in another city where barely fathomable men hurl an orange ball through a metal ring, people return to the streets where they had once burned the king’s robes in order to elevate the king to a god. In Cleveland, old acquaintance has been forgot, because acquaintance isn’t as good as annunciation. LeBron James left Cleveland in the dark, and the city’s rage burned as brightly as the fires from his jerseys, but now, no one remembers the weight of their burdens—only the relief that they can breathe again. It’s a victory parade in Cleveland, and a canonization for James.

And elsewhere, an already favoured team gets better. A city, already blessed by circumstance, stardom, or both, revels in its overkill excesses. Championship hopes become championship ring fittings as league icons link arms and take a city to the top. Miami, Golden State, the ouroboros, whatever.

History eats its own tail. No one learns anything. And no matter the sound and the fury, these momentous events in basketball are earthquakes that somehow flip the sports landscape 360 degrees, right back onto its foundation, undamaged.

Everything has changed, except nothing at all has changed.

As sportswriters and sports fans alike break down Kevin Durant’s surprising announcement that he would leave the Oklahoma City Thunder to partner with Steph Curry and Draymond Green on the already elite Golden State Warriors, what becomes clear is that LeBron James’s Decision—the first one, the one in 2010—was the real game-changer for the NBA. It arguably set off the modern era of professional basketball we live in now, of an association whose franchise powers are most dictated by its superstars; that fact alone drove one of its most prestigious franchises, the Philadelphia 76’ers, to reach new lows in losing to try and chase the kind of league-shifting talent you can typically only acquire with a No. 1 draft pick. And you win, these days, as much by on-court play as by networking; its best players make friendships on national teams and All-Star games, and those allegiances are as significant as salary-cap situations in free-agent negotiations. (Pity on the team whose best players aren’t worthy enough to be invited to such affairs, or whose players live in Canada, where the tax and branding situations are too dim to overcome any wattage of personality.)

The impact of the decisions that came after the original one—LeBron’s Decision 2.0 to return to the Cleveland Cavaliers, where he won a title this year, and Durant’s Monday move—are diminished because the last six years have proven they’re merely reaffirmations of what we already know. Stars move where they want to go. Those star-studded teams will win championships. The NBA will go on. Hyper-drive hot takes about how nothing will be the same are wrong, because in fact everything is the same.

In the meantime, a narrative writes itself. Oklahoma City fans will despair the departure of their massive name (though don’t doubt a potential breakout season for Thunder star Russell Westbrook, who appears to be fuelled by internal fury) and then look to exorcise the chip on their shoulder; in a crowded Western Conference, it may be that Oklahoma City elects to blow up the franchise to chase the city’s first-ever crown. Durant, meanwhile, will see his brand wounded, assailed (wrongly) for daring to make a big deal of his decision, one that held so many franchises’ futures at stake. Those claims will, as LeBron taught us, stalk him for some time—or at least until the shiny trophy he wins comes through.

Without a doubt, the Golden State Warriors will win games in bunches now. How could they not, with two of the three best players in the association? And the Warriors will surely win a championship with Durant, who will finally shake years of claims he can’t win the big one.

But that’s the less interesting part. What is more interesting is what comes after that. Because in the NBA, nothing changes except the laundry.

Actress/writer Mindy Kaling poses at the opening of the new photography exhibit “REFUGEE” at The Annenberg Space for Photography on Thursday, April 21, 2016, in Los Angeles. (Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP)

A TV sitcom having an episode involving a softball game is practically a sitcom-maker commandment—along with “those two shalt get together, and probably during sweeps”—and The Mindy Project, the hanging-in-there comedy on Hulu helmed by Mindy Kaling, is no exception. Earlier this month, Kaling’s OB/GYN doctor character, Mindy Lahiri, found herself urging her office to stick it out in a softball tournament, delivering a motivational, if rambling, speech. “We are going to show them what we got. I’m going to stand in right field and I’m going to be on my phone learning the rules of baseball… or softball. On three. We can do this. Trump in 2016.”

Those words brewed up a controversy in miniature. “I still haven’t watched the new Mindy Project ep, because I can’t deal with her anymore since she’s stupid enough to support Trump,” read one angry tweet (perhaps a redundant description). “Did I hear correctly, Trump 2016 from Mindy Kaling?? That’s disturbing,” said another. And: “WTF is happening when The Mindy Project tries to make a Donald Trump supporter sympathetic?” Even Emily Nussbaum, TheNew Yorker‘s brilliant TV writer, tweeted: “During this (awful, sadly) baseball ep of TMP, Mindy said ‘Go Trump 2016.’ Wha?” How could Kaling, the daughter of two immigrants, possibly support a small-minded, small-handed presidential candidate who spouts visceral hate speech with the ease with which most people say “good morning”?

Well, she doesn’t.

Mindy Kaling, it should go without saying, is not Mindy Lahiri. Kaling cannot practise obstetrics; Mindy Kaling likely has a basic understanding of the rules of baseball. And Lahiri, longtime watchers of the show will know, sets herself up to be a rare antagonizing protagonist—someone who is likeable in spite of her often difficult personality and bullheaded, shortsighted ideas. And yet in the wake of the episode, she gave an interview to Elle that actually felt the need to include the subhead: “PSA: Mindy Lahiri and Mindy Kaling are not the same person.​​”

“Mindy Lahiri is invigorated by Donald Trump and thinks the best thing about his résumé is that he came from a reality show,” Kaling said to Elle. “I’m very impressed by Hillary. She’s incredibly smart and is by far the candidate that has the best credentials to be president.”

It isn’t even the first time this accusation has been levelled at her. In 2013, a piece in Salon referred to her as a Republican after her character made a gun-rights joke, prompting her to respond. “It’s like assuming Alec Baldwin has Jack Donaghy’s politics or something,” she tweeted, referring to the hyper-liberal’s portrayal of the uber-capitalist boss in Tina Fey’s 30 Rock. “It is bewildering.”

Bewildering indeed. This Kaling/Lahiri episode is sad proof of a growing, troubling trend among pop-culture consumers—with more culture available than ever before, with people more educated than ever before and more smart people thinking about it, we’re seeing fewer people bother to actually engage with and interpret shows, movies, and music. Quick to outrage, slow to consider, yet eager to opine, we’re no longer even bothering to read the text of a given piece of art when something in it tweaks one’s personal belief system—and that’s bad for us all.

This is the same style of short-sighted controversy that issued forth in October over “Hotline Bling,” the rapper Drake’s inescapable piece of pop earworm magic. Shortly after it soared to the top of the charts, some began to excoriate its problematic lyrics, pronouncing it to be a carnival of patriarchal overtones and sexism, and a partaking of the idea that “good girls”—docile and subservient—are the best girls. The offending lyrics:

These days, all I do is
Wonder if you’re bendin’ over backwards for someone else
Wonder if you’re rollin’ up a backwoods for someone else
Doing things I taught you, gettin’ nasty for someone else
You don’t need no one else
You don’t need nobody else, no
Why you never alone
Why you always touching road
Used to always stay at home, be a good girl
You was in a zone, yeah
You should just be yourself
Right now, you’re someone else

Which, if you read those lyrics alone, isn’t great, to be sure. But this is not a “sexist anthem”; it is an artistic expression, not a form of advocacy. All baleful minor keys and self-flagellating paranoia, the character that Drake is performing on the song is ruing that he’s waiting desperately to hear from someone it’s clear he won’t get back. This is not a celebration of toxic masculinity; he is a sad-sack because of it. He is, at least in this song, not a participant but a self-aware sufferer of it.

It wasn’t always like this. Sure, when Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita was released, it was met with puritanical fury when people read it as an ode to pedophilia, but these days it’s understood that that reading misses the forest for the trees. And no one believes that The Police’s classic song “Every Breath You Take,” a slinky, eminently creepy song about a stalker, is a celebration of Sting’s love of surveillance—even though Sting himself says the song came from feelings of jealousy stemming from divorce. It’s creepy—but intentionally so, as is its right.

It’s an artist’s right to produce art of their own making, to discuss themes and subjects of their choosing. When we dictate how they should do that and what is appropriate—that’s when we get into trouble. And besides, it shouldn’t have really mattered whether Kaling was a Republican Trump supporter; what impact do her politics have on the comedic potential of a gynaecology office? (Never mind the fact that Lahiri’s support of Trump is essentially satirical, and is as foolish as that 2014 #CancelColbert fracas.) Why must we assume that the characters assumed in songs and books must reflect the mores of Aubrey Graham or Nabokov, and something necessarily societally correct? It deserves to be criticized and debated; it does not deserve to be dismissed and policed.

What’s worse is that this dulls us to the nuance of art. That’s too bad, because there are legitimate conversations to have about these issues—of people with prominent platforms espousing less-than-feminist beliefs, or of immigrants supporting anti-immigrant politicians and the place of advocacy. Problematic art does exist. It should be interrogated and debated. But that shouldn’t deny it the right for us to see where it’s coming from. Quickly overreacting and assuming a hardline stance on what art can and should be—reading it for its surface meaning, and not beyond—does that entire conversation a disservice. When that ritual gets confused for legitimate criticism and actual interrogation, this practice goes from unproductive to nefarious; not engaging with something—not understanding its context, not understanding the form, or otherwise—means it can be easy to miss the actual issues. Instead, we search for something to comfort us, or—just as good—something we can agree is terrible we can collectively rail at. Pop culture is supposed to be easy, under these auspices. It shouldn’t have to be.

It’s the kind of thinking that has already poisoned our media consumption, where readers place value in reading confirmation of their own pre-existing beliefs instead of being challenged by alternative perspectives. But art shouldn’t have to agree with us; great art can be (and must be, if it wants to be) made in opposition to society’s accepted forces. And it is not inherently bad art if it rejects those forces. The modern tendency to think otherwise is further proof that when it comes to pop culture, people are thinking less and less—and believing instead they’re thinking more and more.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/arts/a-plea-why-wont-we-engage-with-pop-culture-anymore/feed/1What if stat nerds were given the keys to a pro baseball team?http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/what-if-stat-nerds-were-given-the-keys-to-a-pro-baseball-team/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/what-if-stat-nerds-were-given-the-keys-to-a-pro-baseball-team/#respondThu, 09 Jun 2016 10:35:41 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=883735Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller, two baseball wonks, get a chance to apply their wildest data dreams in real life

Baseball, that pastime of green grass and chalk lines, of glove pops and cracked pine, has been riven for some time. Michael Lewis’s seminal book Moneyball exposed the last two decades’ defining rift: between the data-driven nerd, trying to make sense of a game romanticized to fantastical oblivion, and the grizzled gut-instinct insider, with his lifetime of games played, innings scouted, and seeds spat. These days, the debate is largely settled: MLB is now an analytics vanguard, offering accessible data—down to the microsecond and micrometer—as its teams, hungry for advantages, snap up statheads. But where in math there is a likely correct call supported and determined by calculations, baseball—revelling in greys—continues to use stats as merely one tool in the decision-making toolkit. The grip of tradition refuses to loosen.

For years, wry writers Lindbergh and Miller—the Seinfeld and Costanza of baseball wonkery, each of whom has served as editor-in-chief of Baseball Prospectus, a Polaris star for data pilgrims—have excoriated these very decisions on their excellent podcast, Effectively Wild. One show led to another, which led to an email from the Sonoma Stompers, an independent baseball team in the Pacific Association: Do you want to run a professional baseball team?

For a pair who relish second-guessing baseball’s hoariest conventions on the no-stakes Internet, the answer was an eager yes. It would be a true test of something that has never been wholly tried: What if spreadsheets and unfeeling data come down from the ivory tower and operate an actual team, to try wild ideas like five-man infields and five-inning closers?

The Stompers’ 2015-16 season, chronicled in this hilarious, smooth-reading book, is the rollicking, gleeful, and sometimes melancholic answer. While the team is professional, the realities are hard; an under-resourced team in a tiny, low-ranking league, it’s a mishmash of young, hungry players desperate to keep moving up, and older vets whose love of the game overpowers the certainty that their big-league dreams are dead. The players’ contract negotiations aren’t over better offers, but rather the wan gravity pull of retirement, of school, of real life. They’re paid a small stipend, given a game-day spread of white bread and peanut butter, and live in the homes of Sonoma families with extra rooms. There is no glamour.

But they do get to be ballplayers for a living. And as is so often the case in sports, it’s dreams—not peanut butter—that provide the fuel. That goes for Lindbergh and Miller, too: the prodigal Lindbergh nurses a chip on his shoulder about his too-short internship with the New York Yankees; Miller, a writer quick with an existential turn of phrase, is hyper-aware of needing to earn the jocks’ respect—”I realize I never did quit thinking that Adam Ferguson was, by virtue of having the strongest arm in third grade, a better person than I was,” he writes. But running a team is the stat-head dream, and so they and a few podcast-listeners-turned-volunteers leap to join “a long line of super-smart people who might have cured cancer if they’d never come across a dumb game in which grown-ups hit cowskin with sticks.” There’s something terribly beautiful about that.

There are emotional issues: the reality of making the hard calls that the analytics-minded don’t have to consider (telling an earnest rookie he’s been released; firing an insouciant manager) and their stumbles into innovation and courage (they replace their manager with the first Japanese native in pro baseball; their ace pitcher Sean Conroy, signed off a spreadsheet, comes out and becomes the first-ever openly gay pro). There are moments of doubt and struggle, the according highs and lows encapsulated by the final, improbable moments of the Stompers’ season. In the end, the two stat heads even concede there may be limits to how far you can go with data alone: “No matter the scouting report, in every game some baseball happens.”

Baseball, implausibly, is the pro sport that most sports fans feel they could potentially play. They’re wrong, of course; hitting against an MLB pitcher is one of the most difficult athletic feats. But the intimacy of the bleachers wrapped around the diamond, the foul balls that occasionally soar into the crowds, the fact that some of its players look like you and me—there’s something about it that inspires wild-eyed dreaming. The Only Rule is It Has to Work is a joy not just because it easily finds the humanity in cold data and spreadsheets, but because, like the best baseball books, it’s the story of the life of dreams—even if those dreams look different by the end.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/what-if-stat-nerds-were-given-the-keys-to-a-pro-baseball-team/feed/0Drake’s incomplete views from the Sixhttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/arts/drakes-incomplete-views-from-the-six/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/arts/drakes-incomplete-views-from-the-six/#commentsFri, 29 Apr 2016 09:16:41 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=864945Drake's new album 'Views' is a triumph of so-called 'Toronto sound'—and yet it reveals how much more than Drake that sound can be

Toronto rapper Drake leaves a Queen St. West pop up shop where he was handing out T-shirts to promote his album ‘Views’ in Toronto on Sunday, April 24, 2016. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Cole Burston

Drake—the so-called Six God, and today’s bottom-starting king of the rap game—has spent the better part of the last two years proving himself to be placeless. There he was, on What A Time To Be Alive, a mixtape so infused with Atlanta rapper Future’s trademark codeine-cyborg purring and a particularly booming production style that Drake sounded more like a boisterous understudy; there he was on songs by West Coast rappers like Y.G. and The Game, sounding at home on the marauding basslines and taut snares that help define a certain kind of Los Angeles sound; there he is on a remix of “Ojuelegba,” a song by Nigerian rapper Wizkid, and there he is shrieking in gleeful patois on “Shutdown,” from grime icon Skepta, whose U.K. label Boy Better Know recently signed October’s Very Own. Heck, Drake even put out a straight-up bachata song, crooning in crisp Spanish alongside Romeo Santos, the king of the sweet Latino genre.

Simultaneously, he’s been setting the expectations sky-high for his fourth studio album, Views, the follow-up to his last true album, 2013’s Nothing Was The Same. It’s perhaps hard to remember now, but when Drake starting singing his hook on “R.I.C.O.”—a collaboration with Meek Mill that he didn’t believe Drake promoted enough, prompting the Philadelphia rapper to dig into ghostwriting allegations and spark a headline-grabbing beef—he riddled the beat with a monkish chant: “Views. Views. Views.” And he cast that conflict as a distraction from the real work at hand: “I took a break from Views,” he said, wrapping up his final exultant diss track “Back to Back” against Mill—”and now it’s back to that.”

So you’d be forgiven for thinking that Views was going to take a broader sonic approach, reflecting a more global ambition beyond Toronto. He has always been, after all, something of a regional polyglot; he was born in Toronto but grew up steeped in Memphis rap, and broke through while working with New Orleans superstar Lil’ Wayne out of Houston. And his peers, now, are the genre’s biggest stars; Kanye West, who lives up the street from him, has called him an inspiration, and he and fellow mega-star Jay Z both appeared on “Pop Style” (before their verses were removed, in one of Drake’s trademark sly power moves). The fact that Drake would excise From the Six from the end of the album’s title just two days before its release implied that this could have been his least Toronto album yet, even if its cover featured him perched atop of the CN Tower, the Internet’s unmissable meme last week. (Though, let it be said, putting the CN Tower on the cover may be just about as mawkish for Torontonians as a New Yorker wearing an “I Heart New York” shirt.)

And so it was something of a surprise to hear that after years of snacking on a wide range of rap sounds, at a time when regionality means less than ever in rap (see the Atlanta-imitating New York rapper at the top of the hip-hop charts), there’s no doubt as to where these Views were from. In a 2009 interview with Complex, he spoke about a powerful urge to become, for Toronto, “that guy…our hometown hero.” With Views, he’s certainly produced the most Drake album he’s made and, sonically, his most Toronto album, too.

Drake is firmly in his comfort zone, largely abandoning the tough-guy persona he’d embraced over his last two projects for silken singing and angular, word-stuffed rapping about well-trodden themes. He proves that there’s a distinct difference between a Drake mixtape and album, drawing a clear lineage between Views, and his very first project, So Far Gone.

But this is a triumph, primarily, of producer Noah “40” Shebib, the long-time architect of the sound Drake’s best known for, and has become regarded as the “Toronto sound”: muted high-ends and scalped samples and mind-blowing snatches of drowned-out underwater R&B. His work on Views is masterful, from his co-production on “Weston Road Flows” with its burbling Mary J. Blige sample, and the gorgeously smouldering “Fire and Desire.”

“The album is based around the change of the seasons in our city,” Drake told Apple Beats 1 radio host Zane Lowe in an interview. “Winter to summer and back to winter again. It’s just to show you the two extreme moods that we have. We love our summers but we also make our winters work.” You can certainly hear that at play—the steely chill of the album’s first third, the opening up into a hot sultry middle, and then the crunchy triumphal lap at the album’s end.

That sultry summer sound—which include standout tracks “Controlla,” and “One Dance,” likely to improbably be Drake’s first number-one hit—is also reflection of Toronto’s past. The city is, after all, the Screwface Capital to Toronto hip-hop heads—a place where up-and-comers have to run a true gauntlet to make it big, to face the ridicule and assault of screw faces, a Jamaican idiom for tough, critical glares. The city’s a diverse melting pot, and so a Caribbean sound has long been a big part of Toronto hip-hop, fuelled by Kardinal Offishall and Michie Mee, Jamaican-Canadians whose dancehall-soaked music made them foundational in the scene. With Views’ muggy middle, Drake is staking claim to both the past and present of Toronto’s hip-hop sonic palette. From how this album sounds, it’s a fine effort.

But still, something’s missing. Yes, this is very much a Drake album, and a totally Toronto sound—but it’s also never been clearer that it no longer reflects the entirety of the full Toronto sound. With 40 and Drake firing at all pistons, Views only pushes the creative limits of what Drake has already done, which means it’s not the definitive picture of the city that he hopes it to be. His has become a defining Toronto sound—still its principal one, sure, but not its only.

That goes beyond the disciples on his OVO Sound label, many crafted in his sonic image. There’s Jazz Cartier’s shadowy, majestic howls. There’s Sean Leon’s recent horrorcore approach to the mic. Daniel Caesar put out one of the best mixtapes of 2015, the Frank Ocean-channelling Pilgrim’s Paradise, which reworks a Kanye West song into an ode to lonely rides on the streetcar. Jimmy B’s boom-bap stylings are militant parades for the Toronto suburb Scarborough. Tory Lanez, a stony-voiced vanguard of this New Toronto, looks to be the city’s next big thing.

Certainly, their rise is at least partly the fruit of Drake’s labours. But there’s a breadth that makes the Toronto sound much more than what Drake has established—perhaps perfected—on Views. Drake remains a global superstar, but perhaps paradoxically, he’s no longer able to swallow his city whole.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s a testament to fertile Toronto rap that even as Drake tries to spend his enormous musical capital making an album that bleeds Toronto—and features him and his producer at their strength—he’s still not able to subsume the entirety of the city’s sound. Even as Drake proves how far he can push the sonic palette that he helped create, and the palette that came before him, he cannot claim all of Toronto. “All you boys in the new Toronto want to be me a little,” he rapped on abandoned pre-album track “Summer Sixteen.” That’s both true, and no longer true.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/arts/drakes-incomplete-views-from-the-six/feed/2On Beyoncé’s ‘Lemonade’, the personal is politicalhttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/arts/on-beyonces-lemonade-the-personal-is-political/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/arts/on-beyonces-lemonade-the-personal-is-political/#commentsMon, 25 Apr 2016 21:08:38 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=864351'Lemonade,' Beyoncé's scorned-lover LP, is made more interesting by its accompanying film—revealing how personal traumas can be political statements

Like a lightning bolt shearing the air, Beyoncé Knowles’s last album—a self-titled surprise in the waning wintry days of 2013—was the kind of capital-M Moment that some feared music releases weren’t able to create anymore. With record sales continuing their decline and existential questions about the value of an album as a unit of music delivery, the galvanizing Beyoncé, complete with a parcel of complementary music videos,was inhaled at once, an unmissable meteor crashing onto the cultural landscape.

Three years later, we have Lemonade—her much-anticipated sixth studio album, available on Tidal, ruining Saturday night plans with its abrupt appearance after an announced HBO special. But what is most surprising about Lemonade wasn’t so much its sudden existence—the world has grown somewhat accustomed to the notion of the surprise album in the years since Beyoncé perfected it, and had been watching her with bated breath to see if a product release or hair flip would trigger new music—but its content. She had, after all, stormed the Super Bowl halftime stage with the new song “Formation,” a clear anthem steeped in Creole twang and watchwords of blackness, a song she performed to millions with Black Panther dancers backing her up. It was easy to presume that the album would represent another kind of cultural moment: a dive into this mostly unseen aspect of the world’s most famous black woman. Many had been calling for Beyoncé to be more openly political in her songwriting and actions—this, though, in spite of her work bailing out protesters in Baltimore after the death of Freddie Gray, and her open embrace of feminism.

But a political statement isn’t really what Lemonade is—at least on its surface. In fact, “Formation” is tacked onto the album’s end, feeling more like a bonus track. Instead, Lemonade is a look at a woman who discovers infidelity, who refuses to brook the betrayal and romps around with righteous revenge, but just before giving into Medea impulses, decides to stay. Listeners wouldn’t be blamed for linking this to rumours of marital tensions between Beyoncé and her rapper husband, Jay Z. But if Beyoncé expressed the crystallizing of lust into love—which, indeed, the pair were drunk in—Lemonade reveals what it’s like for that love to turn to rust.

Jay Z (L) and Beyonce attend the “China: Through The Looking Glass” Costume Institute Benefit Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 4, 2015 in New York City. (Mike Coppola/Getty Images)

This alone is interesting. Beyoncé has rarely been rawer than in Lemonade‘s first half, best expressed in the gleeful rock fury of the Jack White-assisted “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” nor more vulnerable than in its second half, capped off by the stunner “Sandcastles,” where she allows her honed voice to head toward reconciliation while still crackling with anger. It’s a growth of the caution and paranoia we first heard on Beyoncé tracks “Mine” and “Jealous”; this album is the brazen humanization of Beyoncé, the realization that even someone as powerful, beautiful and indeed flawless as her can endure marital strife, and be embittered and bruised. “Nine times out of ten I’m in my feelings, but ten times out of nine I’m only human,” she sings on “Love Drought,” a rare confession from Queen Bey.

The appearance of celebrities’ perfection has always been groomed; look no further than Golden Age Hollywood’s studio-fabricated relationships. It isn’t, of course, believable. Love isn’t stainless and sterile scientific metal; it’s rough-hewn work and crafted compromise and a little bit of magic. It’s the alchemy of transforming lemons into lemonade, of turning nothing into something. The love on Lemonade has rusted, to be sure. But shake off that rust, and you can still uncover steel. This album is that human struggle, writ huge.

But while the album is surely her most personal to date, it’s also her most political—if you know where to look.

Like Beyoncé, Lemonade came with a “visual album,” a film that accompanied the release. But Beyoncé‘s videos were standalone confections, more a compilation of music videos than a filmic narrative. In contrast, Lemonade is a swirling 56-minute stunner stitching together influences of antebellum South, Delta spirituality and a haunting kind of Afro-occultism that makes an otherwise strong album into merely a primary source, mixing and flipping sections of songs in different orders, and tying together the tracks with spoken-word poems by Warsan Shire.

It is in these differences where the long-awaited political Beyoncé emerges.

Where she merely mentions Malcolm X in a throwaway boast on “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” the film takes that beat to sample Malcolm X’s 1962 speech about black women: “The most disrespected person in America is the black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the black woman.” It’s a statement that speaks to both her personal trials and the tribulations of her tribe.

On the album, “Daddy Lessons” is a delicious joyride, a balloon of New Orleans second-line horns and country-music plucking that delivers on the sonic promise of her Alabama father and Louisiana mother. In the film, surrounded by footage of her own dad, it becomes an argument for tying infidelity to generational lineages of fathers and husbands, of a vice borne in men. “Am I talking about your husband, or your father?” she asks rhetorically about the pain and joy both kinds of men can engender.

The merits of this thinking are debatable, especially given the long-held stereotype of absentee black fathers—one that’s been challenged in recent years. But here, the personal is political; Beyoncé’s own father, Mathew, cheated on her mother, Tina. And it’s possible, here, that cheating is a narrative tool: in the absence of untrustworthy men, black or otherwise, the question becomes: who can a disrespected black woman trust?

A still from Beyonce’s Lemonade. (HBO)

Indeed, after incantations of cinnamon and cloves and Bible-stuffed menses, the film offers up “Forward”—a song that, on the album, speaks to pushing ahead toward personal reconciliation. In the film, it’s more than that; it’s juxtaposed with women grappling with grief—the mothers of Mike Brown and Trayvon Martin, draped in black and holding images of their sons but looking straight forward. Then, images of young black women, standing resolute. The generational strength of these women is why she moves forward, and it’s what gives her strength.

And so when the voice of Hattie White, her grandmother-in-law, appears on the next song, “Freedom”—a militant triumph from beatmaker Just Blaze, who just happens to be the producer whose best work helped make her husband famous—it is proof of the power of generations of women. “I had my ups and downs, but I always find the inner strength to pull myself up,” White says. “I was served lemons, but I made lemonade.”

On the album, this comes in the middle, and the listener reads this as reflecting Beyoncé’s desire for independence in her relationship. In the film, it comes near the end amid images of solemn black women and the recitation of Beyoncé’s grandmother’s recipe for lemonade, and those words become a coda, an explicit urging for black women to be inspired by each other to make freedom real.

So while the film is more explicitly political, and the musical album more explicitly personal, it’s the different choices made in making each that are most telling. If the musical album is about a woman’s personal resilience, the visual album is a more specific statement about a broader group—black women—and the ability to find resilience in yourself and your sisters, in the face of the conditions Malcolm X warned about. The two, juxtaposing and intermingling, makes the statement that the personal is in itself deeply political.

People of colour already know this: that in many ways, the act of simply being and choosing how people of colour live our lives is a political choice, in whether we choose to be activist or not. So is the musical album—which will be more widely consumed, but is less openly political—a sign of Beyoncé pulling her punches? Perhaps. But that’s her choice. And in what she’s chosen to reveal, Beyoncé—this immensely famous person who has pulled a thick veil over her life—shows us who she is, who her tribes are, and how she fits into them. By being more personal than ever before, Beyoncé is being political, too.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/arts/on-beyonces-lemonade-the-personal-is-political/feed/1Why the 2007 Super Bowl was an act of peak Princehttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/arts/why-the-2007-super-bowl-was-an-act-of-peak-prince/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/arts/why-the-2007-super-bowl-was-an-act-of-peak-prince/#respondThu, 21 Apr 2016 20:15:10 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=863413He was two decades removed from the height of his powers, but the 2007 Super Bowl halftime show may have been Prince at his Prince-iest

Prince is shown in silhouette as he performs during the halftime show at the Super Bowl XLI football game at Dolphin Stadium in Miami on Sunday, Feb. 4, 2007. Prince’s acclaimed performance included a guitar solo during the “Purple Rain” segment of his medley in which his shadow was projected onto a large, flowing beige sheet. As the 48-year-old rock star let rip, the silhouette cast by his figure and his guitar (shaped like the singer’s symbol) had phallic connotations for some. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

For years, the Super Bowl halftime show has regularly punched below its weight class in its actual musical impact. Sure, it’s an incredible cultural touchstone—watched by hundreds of thousands and beamed into the houses of millions more, arguably the year’s central performance of the state of American popular culture—but the performances themselves have, historically, been rather wanting. There are often meanings and cants, and there are memes and crotch slides, but the show itself often collapses under the weight of its own self-importance.

Not in 2007, though. That’s the year Prince—who died today at the unfair age of 57—unleashed the halftime show by which all others will be judged.

It was a perfect song list, a mix of classic Prince (“Purple Rain,” “Let’s Go Crazy”) and rollicking covers (Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary,” Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower,” the Foo Fighters’ “The Best Of You”)—a signal of the latter-day Prince who, despite his prolific personal catalogue, evolved into a fantastic cover musician, finding and revelling in the epic, funky rollicking crannies of other musician’s songs.

And Prince wouldn’t allow a torrential downpour, which had spent the last two hours drenching a muddy football game that had gotten bogged down after a first-play touchdown, to diminish his performance. Instead, he leaned into it. Bruce Rodgers, a production designer that night, remembers the artist being nonplussed about the rain: “Prince said, ‘Can you make it rain harder?’ ”

He was a whirling dervish in the middle of the whipping winds, giving the effect of witnessing King Lear howling into the storm, except it was unclear who was the force of nature. Slippery tile be-damned, Prince and his dancers strutted across every inch of that stage like it was his home. “I’ve got another confession my friend,” he sang, flicking the cockiest, most coquettish look imaginable as the last strains of “The Best Of You” played. “I ain’t no fool.”

And then that closing number: a pathetic-fallacy-infused performance of “Purple Rain,” with Prince at its centre, urging his flock to sing along like a gospel choir. It was electric.

But the show wasn’t merely musically mammoth—it also happened to be peak Prince. It came decades after his artistic peak—the truly incredible five-album string of solid-gold hits between 1979’s Prince and 1984’s Purple Rain—and in the years before, he’d released greatest hits albums and won lifetime achievement awards. But the show firmly established that he wasn’t ready to be relegated to the legacy-act bin. This was an opportunity to remind people just who he was.

And so there was the Prince-est possible move in the middle of that glorious “Purple Rain”: launching into a crunchy, soaring guitar solo as a giant beige sheet blossomed in front of him, leaving just Prince’s shadow to look like it was manipulating a giant penis. It’s hard to know if Prince knew what the effect would be—it is pleasing to think that he did—and it’s not as if people like Hendrix or Van Halen didn’t ever play the guitar like it was a phallic extension. But this was classic Prince: just three years after the outrage over the Janet Jackson-exposing “wardrobe malfunction” seen around the world and the conservative aversion to controversy that followed, Prince took the NFL’s insinuation that he was over-the-hill and unapologetically went all-in.

The act even gave rise to one of the all-time great complaints to the Federal Communications Commission—wherein a parent claimed that the performance turned their child gay, thus precluding them from their dream of being a quarterback.

Prince was, inexplicably, often an artist that his fans had to defend—as if his otherworldly talent didn’t speak for itself. For too many people, it was impossible to square his seductive, effete sexuality and his louche lyrics with the fact that he was a guitar god, a shredder with few true peers—and a creative genius who influenced so many, in rock, funk, hip-hop, and beyond. There was a time where the fact that he sat naked on a white horse and wore his libido on his low-cut painted-on pants was enough to discomfit and distract from his musical ability.

But on this night in 2007, where he wailed into a storm and hundreds of thousands wailed back, even a giant pseudo-penis’s shadow on a sheet couldn’t deny Prince’s sheer talent. In 2007, the world’s largest stage looked downright cozy to Prince. All the stages in between did, too. He will be missed.

South Korean professional Go player Lee Sedol reviews the match after finishing the final match of the Google DeepMind Challenge Match against Google’s artificial intelligence program, AlphaGo, in Seoul, South Korea, Tuesday, March 15, 2016. Google’s Go-playing computer program again defeated its human opponent in a final match on Tuesday that sealed its 4:1 victory. (Lee Jin-man/AP)

In the right circles, it had all the buzz of a championship boxing match, and the tense sporting atmosphere of a Super Bowl. Millions of people tuned in on live streams to watch. The stakes, too, were high, at a million dollars. But in one corner was Lee Sedol, a South Korean grandmaster in the ancient and complex game of Go—and in the other, the AI program AlphaGo, designed by Google’s Deep Mind team.

The result, though, was hardly dramatic. With three straight victories to start the five-game series—Sedol was only able to take the fourth game—AlphaGo trounced the human Go star.

If an elite human player losing a game to a computer feels like old hat—chess legend Garry Kasparov lost to Deep Blue two decades ago, and Jeopardy players fell to IBM’s Watson in 2011—this particular loss is actually particularly momentous. What made the AlphaGo victory so impressive is that the possibilities for a single move in Go are massive, even more so than in a game like chess. So a victory in this game calls for something far more than mere supercomputers and computing strength. It calls for “deep learning,” which uses neural networks, modelled after the brain’s neurons, that allow programs to effectively learn like humans do—by seeing the world, consuming data, and learning patterns and rules.

These neural networks were, in the 1980s, once popular—then were dismissed as bunk by the AI establishment. But scientists like 68-year-old Geoffrey Hinton, a Canadian considered the “godfather of neural networks” who now splits his time between the University of Toronto and Google, pressed forward with the work. It turned out that his way was the right way; now that the power of computing has caught up with the algorithms, deep learning has become seen as technology’s next big thing, sparking bidding wars among companies like Google to buy up firms researching ways to use deep learning.

So while AlphaGo cruised to victory, the triumph actually represents something of a comeback story. For decades, the idea of “deep learning” was seen as scientific lunacy. It was only through the work of scientists like Hinton that it has become the next big thing—a way of programming that’s already influencing the apps we have in our own pockets.

In an interview with Maclean’s, Hinton explains what the future of deep learning holds, why we shouldn’t be afraid of AI, and whether or not he’s vindicated by its successes so far.

Geoffrey Hinton. (Michelle Siu)

Q: What did you think of AlphaGo’s wins?

A: It was quite exciting. I mean, I stayed up until 2 a.m. watching the games. We really didn’t know before the first game with Lee Sedol whether AlphaGo had serious weaknesses that we just didn’t know about. And we saw in the fourth game there were some weaknesses. In the end, it was very exciting. The people on the team thought AlphaGo would probably win, but they didn’t know. It’s probably lucky that Game 4 wasn’t Game 1, if he had won the first game they’d be really nervous.

Q: So, why is it important that AI triumphed in the game of Go?

A: It relies on a lot of intuition. The really skilled players just sort of see where a good place to put a stone would be. They do a lot of reasoning as well, which they call reading, but they also have very good intuition about where a good place to go would be, and that’s the kind of thing that people just thought computes couldn’t do. But with these neural networks, computers can do that too. They can think about all the possible moves and think that one particular move seems a bit better than the others, just intuitively. That’s what the feed point neural network is doing: it’s giving the system intuitions about what might be a good move. It then goes off and tries all sorts of alternatives. The neural networks provides you with good intuitions, and that’s what the other programs were lacking, and that’s what people didn’t really understand computers could do.

Q: In 2014, experts said that Go might be something AI could one day win at, but the common thinking was that it would take at least a decade. Obviously, they undershot that estimate. Would you have guessed then that this was possible?

A: I guess I would’ve believed that if you got together a really good team, really well-managed, and you pushed really hard for a year, and you use these neural networks, maybe you could do it—probably not, but maybe. But the Deep Mind people really made it. So I was surprised they did it so quickly.

Q: So what now? Are there other, even more complicated games that the AI world wants to conquer next?

A: From what we think of as board games and things like that, I don’t think there is—I think this is really the pinnacle. There are of course other games, these fantasy games, where you interact with characters who say things to you. AI still can’t deal with those because they still can’t deal with natural language well enough, but it’s getting much better. And the way translation’s currently done will change because Google now has what promises to be a much better way to do machine translation. That’s part of understanding natural language properly, and that’ll influence lots of things—it’ll influence fantasy games and things like that, but it will also allow you to search much better, because you’ll have a better sense of what documents mean. It’s already influencing things—in Gmail you have Smart Reply, that figures out from an email what might be a quick reply, and it gives you alternatives when it thinks they’re appropriate. They’ve done a pretty good job. You might expect it to be a big table, of ‘If the email looks like this, this is a good reply, and if the email looks like that, then his might be a good reply.’ It actually synthesizes the reply from the email. The neural net goes through the words in the email, and gets some internal state in its neurons, and then uses that internal state to generate a reply. It’s been trained in a lot of data, where it was told what the kinds of replies are, but it’s actually generating a reply, and it’s much closer to how people do language.

Q: Beyond games, then—what might come next for AI?

A: It depends who you talk to. My belief is that we’re not going to get human-level abilities until we have systems that have the same number of parameters in them as the brain. So in the brain, you have connections between the neurons called synapses, and they can change. All your knowledge is stored in those synapses. You have about 1,000-trillion synapses—10 to the 15, it’s a very big number. So that’s quite unlike the neural networks we have right now. They’re far, far smaller, the biggest ones we have right now have about a billion synapses. That’s about a million times smaller than the brain.

Q: Do you dare predict a timeline for that?

A: More than five years. I refuse to say anything beyond five years because I don’t think we can see much beyond five years. And you look at these past predictions like there’s only a market in the world for five computers [as allegedly said by IBM founder Thomas Watson] and you realize it’s not a good idea to predict too far into the future.

Q: The popular thinking on stories like AlphaGo can be one of fear—the fear that AI will become better than us, and will come to dominate humanity. Is it totally preposterous to fear the results of deep learning?

A: Well, I think people need to understand that deep learning is making a lot of things, behind-the-scenes, much better. Deep learning is already working in Google search, and in image search; it allows you to image search a term like “hug.” It’s used to getting you Smart Replies to your Gmail, it’s in speech and vision, it will soon be used in machine translation I believe. It will be applied to other major problems like climate science for example, and energy conservation, and in genomics.

So it’s a bit like … as soon as you have good mechanical technology, you can make things like backhoes that can dig holes in the road. But of course a backhoe can knock your head off. But you don’t want to not develop a backhoe because it can knock your head off, that would be regarded as silly. Obviously, if they’re used wrong, that can happen. Any new technology, if it’s used by evil people, bad things can happen. But that’s more a question of the politics of the technology. I think we should think of AI as the intellectual equivalent of a backhoe. It will be much better than us at a lot of things. And it can be incredibly good—backhoes can save us a lot of digging. But of course, you can misuse it.

Q: There’s also the fear that AI will render humanity obsolete, that there will come an inevitable loss of labour.

A: It’s hard to predict beyond five years. I’m pretty confident it won’t happen in the next five years, and I’m fairly confident that it won’t be something I’m going to have to deal with. But it’s something people should definitely be thinking about. But the main thing shouldn’t be, how do we cripple this technology so it can’t be harmful, it should be, how do we improve our political system so people can’t use it for bad purposes?

South Korean professional Go player Lee Sedol is seen on TV screens during the Google DeepMind Challenge Match against Google’s artificial intelligence program, AlphaGo, at the Yongsan Electronic store in Seoul, South Korea, Wednesday, March 9, 2016. Google’s computer program AlphaGo defeated its human opponent, Lee, in the first game of their highly anticipated five-game match. (Ahn Young-joon/AP)

Q: How important is the power of computing to continued work in the deep learning field?

In deep learning, the algorithms we use now are versions of the algorithms we were developing in the 1980s, the 1990s. People were very optimistic about them, but it turns out they didn’t work too well. Now we know the reason is they didn’t work too well is that we didn’t have powerful enough computers, we didn’t have enough data sets to train them. If we want to approach the level of the human brain, we need much more computation, we need better hardware. We are much closer than we were 20 years ago, but we’re still a long way away. We’ll see something with proper common-sense reasoning.

Q: Can the growth in computing continue, to allow applications of deep learning to keep expanding?

A: For the last 20 years, we’ve had exponential growth, and for the last 20 years, people have said it can’t continue. It just continues. But there are other considerations we haven’t thought of before. If you look at AlphaGo, I’m not sure of the fine details of the amount of power it was using, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was using hundreds of kilowatts of power to do the computation. Lee Sedong was probably using about 30 watts, that’s about what the brain takes, it’s comparable to a light bulb. So hardware will be crucial to making much bigger neural networks, and it’s my guess we’ll need much bigger neural networks to get high-quality common sense.

Q: In the ’80s, scientists in the AI field dismissed deep learning and neural networks. What changed?

A: Mainly the fact that it worked. At the time, it didn’t solve big practical AI problems, it didn’t replace the existing technology. But in 2009, in Toronto, we developed a neural network for speech recognition that was slightly better than the existing technology, and that was important, because the existing technology had 30 years of a lot of people making it work very well, and a couple grad students in my lab developed something better in a few months. It became obvious to the smart people at that point that this technology was going to wipe out the existing one.

Google was then the first to use their engineering to get it into their products and in 2012, it came out in the Android, and made the speech recognition in the Android work much better than before: It reduced the word-error rate to about 26 per cent. Then, in 2012, students in my lab took that technology that had been developed by other people, and developed even further, and while the existing technology was getting 26 per cent errors, and we got 16 per cent errors. In the years after we did that, people said, ‘Wow, this really works.’ They were very skeptical for many many years, they published papers dismissing it. Over the next years, they all switched to it.

Then in the next few years, the error rate went down from 16 per cent, which is what we got, to about four per cent. It was much, much, much better. That led the big companies and the academics to realize this really works.

Q: This kind of intellectual comeback story feels like it could only happen in science. The writer Thomas Kuhn talks about it when he talked about “paradigm shifts”—that these scientific revolutions don’t necessarily produce better ideas, just different ideas. Culture at large seems to have lost this concept. Is the comeback of deep learning the kind of thing that can only happen in science?

A: I think that’s what differentiates science from religion. In science, you can say things that seem crazy, but in the long run they can turn out to be right. We can get really good evidence, and in the end the community will come around. Probably the scientists you’re arguing with won’t come around, but the younger generation will defect, and that’s what’s happening with deep learning. It’s not so much the old conventional AI guys are believing in it, it’s the young graduate students all seeing which ways things are going.

I had some experience with this when I was young, in the 1950s. My father was an entomologist who believed in continental drift. In the early ’50s, that was regarded as nonsense. It was in the mid-50s that it came back. Someone had thought of it 30 or 40 years earlier named Alfred Wegener, and he never got to see it come back. It was based on some very naive ideas, like the way Africa sort of fit into South America, and geologists just pooh-poohed it. They called it complete rubbish, sheer fantasy.

I remember a very interesting debate that my father was involved in, where there was a water beetle that can’t travel very far and can’t fly. You have these in the north coast of Australia, and in millions of years, they haven’t been able to travel from one stream to another. And it came up that in the north coast of New Guinea, you have the same water beetle, with slight variations. The only way that could have happened was if New Guinea came off Australia and turned around, that the north coast of New Guinea used to be attached to the coast of Australia. It was very interesting seeing the reaction of the geologists to this argument, which was that ‘beetles can’t move continents.’ They refused to look at the evidence.

Q: Did you ever think of quitting in the face of the establishment’s dismissal of your thinking?

A: People were very, very much against this stuff. Things were tough then. But my view was, the brain has to work somehow, and it sure as hell doesn’t work the way normal computer programs work, and in particular, the idea that everything has to be programmed into AI is crazy. You interact with the world, and you figure out how the world works. It seemed to me the only hope to getting a lot of knowledge into an AI system was to develop learning algorithms that allowed them to learn this knowledge. That approach in the long run I thought was the only one with any hope of success. And it turned out I was right.

Q: Is that particularly vindicating for you?

A: Yes. I try not to crow about it, but it does look like the approach that me and some other people have been advocating for a long time is actually now working a lot better than the conventional AI.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/society/science/the-meaning-of-alphago-the-ai-program-that-beat-a-go-champ/feed/1Ellen Page on ‘Gaycation’ and the privilege of travelhttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/television/ellen-page-on-gaycation-and-the-privilege-of-travel/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/television/ellen-page-on-gaycation-and-the-privilege-of-travel/#respondMon, 14 Mar 2016 15:48:27 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=846613On VICELAND's 'Gaycation,' Ellen Page and Ian Daniel travel the world to take the temperature of gay culture

On Valentine’s Day 2014, Ellen Page—the Oscar-nominated Halifax actor best known for roles in Juno, the X-Men franchise and Whip It—came out as gay at a conference for Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBT civil rights advocacy group in the U.S. The fact that her coming out was a political act presaged the next two years, as she’s taken on Ted Cruz and spoken candidly on LGBT and environmental issues.

Her latest project, Gaycation, feels like a logical endeavour. The show, airing Wednesdays on Vice’s new Viceland channel, follows Page and her best friend, filmmaker and gay man Ian Daniel, as they travel the world. But this is not a frolicking resort-front travelogue; Page and Daniel seek out the reality of countries like Japan and Brazil, looking to unearth what it is really like to be gay in the world. Maclean’s spoke to Page and Daniel about the show and the challenges making it.

Q: Gaycation as a name feels like a bit of a red herring, because it can conjure ideas of escape and frivolity—but it’s not really a vacation at all. In the first few episodes, you both put yourselves into a situation that is emotionally fraught and hard, from witnessing a Japanese man’s coming out, to confronting a former police officer in Brazil who has allegedly targeted and killed gay people. Was that something you committed to, from the show’s outset?

Page: That was really the main reason for making the show, but that being said, the idea behind it did come out of my love for travel shows. I loved them as a little kid and I loved Anthony Bourdain, but I really did want to see one about LGBTQ communities and culture and the specific country that we visit. Of course it is about the joys and the triumphs and the nightlife, but sadly, unfortunately, it’s also about the discrimination that people face, because that’s the reality. I think the name came out of the fact that a lot of people just don’t know—they don’t know what so many people face around the world or even in their own country, where there’s a variety of experience, and despite the incredible progress we’ve seen, that progress hasn’t necessarily reached everyone. I wanted to kind of have this title to have you be open to the experience, and then you enter it and you do see the realities.

Q: It’s also something of an anti-travel show, in the sense that travel shows tend to highlight those joys and showcase the best of places. But if I were gay, I may actually think twice about going to some of these places.

Page: That’s a great point, and it will all depend on the viewer, but if you are a LGBTQ person, if you’re going to travel somewhere, you do need to be mindful of where you’re going, particularly depending on the country. That’s just something unfortunately you need to think about. It’s something you need to think about if you’re a woman, it’s something to think about particularly if you’re a trans woman, and the problems a lot of trans people face when they’re travelling. Unfortunately. I wish it wasn’t the case. I wish it was, “Oh, we’re here!” I wish transphobia, biphobia, homophobia didn’t exist, and I wish that’s what the show could just be, but sadly that’s not the situation around the world.

Q: Though this is an LGBTQ travel show, there are vast differences in experiences on that spectrum. For instance, there are fewer spaces generally for lesbians than there are for gay men. Since you two are travelling together, what differences have you noticed between what’s available for gay men versus gay women?

Ian Daniel: Travel in general is just harder on some people who are LGTBQ than others. I think trans people, for example—there’s more scrutiny at TSA checkpoints. So there’s a fear even entering that space. So I think there’s a privilege to even travel, and how difficult it is for so many other people. I’m only able to think of my own experiences as a gay white man, and I do understand that I have a level of privilege that other people in the LGBTQ world don’t have. There are also just places where there are more bars for gay men than there are for lesbians, and I would say that’s probably the case for America as well, and in Japan. A lot of bars are catered to the gay male experience.

And then I’m travelling with a gay woman, and so I think Ellen’s experience maybe isn’t totally different, but we try to reflect that on the show, the differences that do exist.

Page: Well, first we need to say: Look, we’re having an unusual experience because we’re going with cameras and local producers and we get access to spaces, so it’ll be different from if you’re going as a tourist. So I guess I notice things as a woman just in the way I’m spoken to, or the way people relate to Ian in an interview versus myself, and the way things are explained to me versus the way they’re explained to Ian, which is a dynamic that would pop up in my life in lots of ways.

Q: Do you feel a pressure to be an advocate in your creative works?

Daniel: Pressure sometimes feels like a negative word to me; I think it feels like a responsibility to make it an empowered thing, and it just truly does. We come from a gay perspective, and the show is called Gaycation, and the experience is really about the LGBTQ experience around the world. So I don’t know if you could avoid that responsibility, I think that’d be a really irresponsible, bad show. I wouldn’t have called myself an activist or really an LGBTQ advocate. I can only speak to my own experience, and I think I was potentially naive about what other people go through, so doing this show you clearly become an advocate. Through listening to all these stories, I feel very fortunate to be part of the experience and that people are so willing to share their stories even when it’s so risky to do so, so you just feel an utter responsibility to represent their stories in the right way. You definitely want the LGBTQ community that watches it to feel like you’re being respectful not just of the people you’re talking to, but representing the community as a whole. I do feel more empowered to speak up when the time is right, and I’m on a show where I have a voice to do that.

Page: Yeah, the word responsibility is right, and doing everything you can to educate yourself and learn and be aware.

Q: But as a public figure do you feel the responsibility to be an advocate?

Page: I’m passionate about these issues, and honestly, I feel so lucky to have the opportunity to make the show, and that it is in alignment with what I’m interested in, with what I read about. For me, it just felt like an organic step—of course, I’m thinking I want a show that allows for more representation for the community and shows the struggles people face, especially when we’re hearing all this political rhetoric—to have a way to show how much this affects people lives. How it’s not just a sound bite, and see how it really manifests in our society, and if you’re a person who perpetuates discrimination and inequality, that’s just wrong and there are consequences to that.

But for me, it’s just sincere—it is what I’m creatively interested in. Spike [Jonze, president of Viceland] was like, “Do you have an idea?” I said, “Yeah I do!” And I feel lucky that Viceland wanted to make it, and I’m producing more than one film with LGBT characters and stories and it’s because it’s what I’m interested in. I’m not going to read a script and say, ‘They’re not gay, I’m not going to do it,’ but I am interested in playing more gay people, because I’ve only played one gay person, and I’ve done a fair amount of movies, and I am interested in those stories. So for me, there’s no should-I-or-shouldn’t-I. It all feels natural.

Ellen Page and Ian Daniel in a promotional still from the VICELAND show ‘GAYCATION.’

Q: Ian, you mentioned you felt naive going into this. Can you expand on that?

Daniel: I was reflecting on: what does it mean to be on camera, what does it mean to be in the public eye, and a gay man on the public eye? And just personally—you know, where am I at on my conversation with my family and my friends. I was an out gay man, but with this, I’m really out, right—there’s no question anymore. So thought about what that meant for me, and I thought, okay cool, this is the next step in my life, and an idea I believe in. But then you think about the responsibility, about the issues, it’s not just going to be about who’s sexy at a bar and what bar is fun to go to, it’s going to be about oppression and human rights and humanity in general. I’m just reflecting about how much I had to learn. I’ve gone to these countries and I understand my limitations about what I know, about, for instance, the transgender experience—I have a lot to learn about what people are facing on the daily, and so I read a lot about that. I also think I was naive about LGBTQ history in our own country.

Q: I think every travel show has the same problem, which is that you have to reduce a country down to however many minutes the show is, and doing so for the audience who’s watching—generally a North American one. That kind of essentializing might be even harder to avoid here on Gaycation, because you are bringing the lens of what things are like in North America and necessarily comparing them. There was a conversation you had with the dancehall artist Beenie Man about this when you went to Jamaica—where he really railed against that idea of culture vs. progress. How do you reconcile that?

Page: It’s just something we’re talking about and thinking about all the time, reflecting on our privilege—the privilege of what it means even be able to travel. So I think in that moment—and I understand what he’s saying, y’know, believe me—but I’m trying to say we’re trying not to go some place and seem judgmental. We’re trying, despite having done research and having obviously preconceived ideas, we try our best to be as open-hearted as possible, and try to create context. So that’s always going to be the challenge, making a program like this, and we are always thinking about it, reflecting on it, and doing our best to show the whole picture as much as possible in a 45-minute span. Hopefully that comes across.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/television/ellen-page-on-gaycation-and-the-privilege-of-travel/feed/0American beauty: The outsider spirit of U.S. photographyhttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/arts/american-beauty-the-outsider-spirit-of-u-s-photography/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/arts/american-beauty-the-outsider-spirit-of-u-s-photography/#respondSat, 12 Mar 2016 16:50:26 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=844413As America debates who gets to be American, a new AGO exhibit is a reminder that America is made great by its outsiders

It is rare for outsiders to be comfortable becoming insiders. They’re supposed to stand at the periphery, staring cock-eyed at the establishment and the comfortable narratives it tells. If, as the painter Robert Motherwell says, art is necessary as the “examination of self-deception,” it’s important for artists to be outsiders—to jar us from easy truths, to cause clean lines to blur, to make us question our world.

And so it is striking that seeing the Art Gallery of Ontario’s new exhibit, Outsiders: American Photography and Film, 1950s-1980s—a compelling and ambitious look at the essential American photographers who captured the oddballs and underbellies and miniature tragedies of the country’s fecund postwar period, from Diane Arbus to Garry Winogrand and beyond—is also seeing the works of the essential canon of American photography as a whole. All together, it tells an interesting story of its own: that the establishment of American photography is constituted of rebels, that American photography was made better by its outsiders—and that America was, too.

“These are the giants,” said Jim Shedden, the AGO’s manager of publishing, of the photographers and filmmakers featured in the exhibit he co-curated. “The technology and the time, and its contradictions—that you can choose to be free in America, but many chose not to be free—these photographers were responding to that, that culture of conformity and oppression and blandness.”

It was a time of easy American narratives. The United States, puffed up and buoyant after its triumphal interventions in the Second World War, revelled in their new place as a true global superpower. That rise, many believed at the time, was achieved through the ethos of its American dream: that anyone could do anything through hard work amid limited social barriers. But the most toxic social barrier of all became that paralyzing American dream; it allowed figures like Joseph McCarthy to protect American ideals by defining themselves against who they weren’t—those damn Soviet commies—at any cost. America, between the 1950s and 1980s, was an ascendant, flush country that wanted you to be as American as you could be, but under a specific set of national values. If you decided not to follow them, you were un-American—and there was nothing worse.

Photography became a major part of the telling of this rigorous American narrative. New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), which according to culture author Fred Turner was “an extraordinary forum for the development of pro-democratic propaganda and for debates about what forms it should take” in the 1930s, produced the popular 1942 exhibit Road to Victory, discovering that photography was an ideal medium to subtly stir the American spirit. The MoMA followed that up in 1955 with the legendary Family of Man, which became a record-smashing success, the showcasing of lives through photos by artists like Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams. But by presenting largely white faces and the nuclear family, it advanced the myth of a singular, specifically American dream. Lange’s original callout for submissions sought to “reveal by visual images Man’s dreams and aspirations, his strength, his despair under evil”; the exhibit was sponsored by the U.S.I.A., a diplomacy arm of the government. By exhibiting in 37 countries—to more than nine million people—it became a state-sanctioned act of soft power. “It was an American effort to use photography to try to normalize American values in an international context,” said Sarah Parsons, an associate professor at York University’s visual arts department.

And so, as artists do, American photography rebelled.

You can see it in Gordon Parks’s searing photos of a black family in 1960s Harlem, daring to have them published in Life—the leading magazine for white, middle-class America, a magazine that provided at least a fifth of the photos in the Family of Man exhibit, and an outlet that would not typically force its readers to reckon with the uncomfortable realities of poverty, literally staring them in the face. You can see it in the photos of Diane Arbus, whose artistic portfolio collapsed the line between the surreal and real, a carnival of marginalized people marching in front her lens. You see it in Danny Lyon’s striking photos of biker culture, his “New Journalism” photographs serving a clarion call for a style of American liberty that is today seen as idealistic but was, at the time, seen as subversive.

And you can see it in perhaps the crown jewel of the AGO’s exhibit, a collection of photos from “Casa Susanna,” a secreted-away New York compound where men would come to cross-dress, to cavort, to photograph each other to give proof of an existence they knew was real but felt they had to suffocate in American society. “They needed to document the reality of their lived existence in order for that experience to be complete,” said Parsons. “Maybe there’s something particularly American about that, this sense of confirmation of reality.”

Then a funny thing happened on the way to rebellion. Through sheer talent and the searing imagery, the outsiders became the institutional names of their medium. Perhaps that was always going to happen; as Parsons says, photos that resonate the most are the ones that “use photography to give us an image we don’t necessarily have in our own mind, or that we’re not familiar with.” Indeed, seeing their work today is to see a truer vision of America—perhaps a more recognizable America—than the vision of nuclear families and tidy lives. Images like the ones from these outsiders have now been pulled to the centre of American life.

There is, too, something very American about this era of photography. Perhaps it comes from the legacy of those American MoMA exhibits; perhaps it’s in the muscular portraiture of these stark photos, of the brazen certainty in freezing a certain moment; perhaps it’s in the fact that America is today’s destination for people looking to train to become a photographer. Perhaps it’s the fact this was a fledgling country finding its footing whose adolescence was being documented like all the firsts of an infant, and by being documented made the narrative realer, like the photos from Casa Susanna. Or perhaps it’s in the way that this America was able to reflect the world at large: “I think it’s … a place that’s very well-suited to photography in that it seems kind of class-less,” says Parsons. “It has both high and low, it can speak to historical moments, it enables us to articulate totally different positions and see them all together.”

Certainly, America doesn’t have a monopoly on contemporary photography—the medium’s fertile heritage in Europe contradicts that possibility—and it is not the sole American art form, given the existence of abstract expressionism, jazz, and hip-hop. But seeing the work of these photographers is simultaneously a chronicle of the blossoming of America and the blossoming of an art form—and it’s hard to see them as distinct.

What does it mean when outsiders critiquing the idea of America becomes the American institution? It makes it all the more powerful, more inclusive—and reforms the story that America tells. It means something, too, that this American art form, constituted by these outsider visions, is created by outsiders themselves; nearly all of the artists featured in the AGO exhibit are Jewish immigrants, or first-generation Jewish-Americans, a community “that is deeply outsider, not by choice,” says co-curator Shedden. And it means something that arguably the defining photographer of the U.S. is Robert Frank, whose seminal work The Americans collected elegiac portraits of his pan-American road trip (and whose influence suffuses the AGO’s exhibit)—but he isn’t even American, having been born and raised in Switzerland.

The idea that there is something very American about photography makes Outsiders, then, a surprisingly timely exhibit. These days, America has found itself wracked by division, its politics obsessed with Mexican migrants, Syrian refugees, and debates over who gets to be an American. A return to order is needed, its politicians promise; America must be restored to its former lustre. But as the leading American artists in a leading American art form shows, it took a collective of outsiders to make America great in the first place. And, maybe, once again.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/arts/american-beauty-the-outsider-spirit-of-u-s-photography/feed/0How Kim Cattrall got a date with Pierre Trudeauhttp://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/how-kim-cattrall-got-a-date-with-pierre-trudeau/
http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/how-kim-cattrall-got-a-date-with-pierre-trudeau/#respondMon, 07 Mar 2016 23:52:50 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=843171Amid a 60 Minutes controversy over a photo mix-up, we dug into the archives to hear from Kim Cattrall on how she met P.E.T.

It may have been the most buzzed-about moment in a 60 Minutes profile of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that largely fizzled. As Lara Logan narrated Justin’s fraught childhood as the son of a PM father and a mother who struggled with undiagnosed bipolar disorder, a B-roll image of Canadian actress Kim Cattrall—not Margaret Trudeau—flashed on screen. Cattrall, who, at 24, was a year away from appearing in the blockbuster film Porky’s (the second-highest-grossing Canadian film of all time), had in fact dated the senior Trudeau, who was then 62. We unearthed an explanation from the March 23, 1981, issue of Maclean’s about the unique circumstances of their meeting:

“I asked myself, ‘How do you go about getting a date with the prime minister?’ and then I just decided to call him up and ask for one,” explains actress Kim Cattrall, 24, a Vancouver native who attended the Genie Awards last week in Toronto with Pierre Trudeau. Cattrall met the prime minister at the December opening of the film Tribute, in which she co-stars with Jack Lemmon and Robby Benson. The pair hit it off and have been “in touch” ever since by telephone between Ottawa and Cattrall’s home in Los Angeles.

“He’s certainly a dream of a date. Very charming, kind and a total gentleman,” says Cattrall, who provided her date with the $100-a-person tickets, which she got free as a presenter. After the awards, the couple went to dinner and wound up the evening at the after-Genie party where they partook of “a little cha-cha and a little waltz.”

Forget about Tinder. Turns out all you need to snag a date with a world leader is the right phone number and a little bit of moxie.

If this was to be Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s most significant introduction to American audiences, it was to be far slimmer than the show’s name would suggest. A 13-minute 60 Minutes segment about Trudeau—the first Canadian politician featured on the show in 13 years, timed for just before his state dinner at the White House on Thursday—felt more like it lasted 60 seconds, a weightless introduction to a country that has been invisible on the United States’ No. 1 news show.

The reality, of course, is that Lara Logan’s 60 Minutes segment was not for Canadians, despite Canadians’ thrill that the newsmagazine was set to join outlets like Vogue and the New York Times to deign to cast a light on Canada. Nevertheless, the segment offered little new insight into Trudeau, spending swaths of time on his family and his affection for boxing in the wake of his 2012 fight against Patrick Brazeau. Here are five takeaways from the piece:

1. Margaret Trudeau is not Kim Cattrall.

The segment spent a large chunk of its time on Trudeau’s personal life, setting him in the context of a father that may still resonate for American audiences. But during a mention of his mother Margaret’s history of mental illness, 60 Minutes sent up a B-roll image of Kim Cattrall, the actress that Pierre briefly dated. In a segment that ends with Trudeau suggesting that Americans should “pay attention to us from time to time, too,” it’s a bit of an embarrassment.
Last word on this to Cattrall — for now:

2. Justin Trudeau is a fan of 2006’s Rocky Balboa.

“People think that boxing is all about how hard you can hit your opponent. It’s not. Boxing is about how hard a hit you can take and keep going,” he said, linking his politics to his love of the ring. But if it sounds familiar, it may be because you’re a completionist of the Rocky series of films: In the movie Rocky Balboa, an aged, retired Rocky delivers those lines, nearly word for word, to his son Robert. (For whatever it’s worth, the 2015 follow-up Creed revealed that Robert moved to Vancouver; perhaps in the Rocky universe, Robert passed on this advice to a ski-instructor pal?) The lines about boxing don’t sound too different, either, from what he told Globe and Mail writer Ian Brown in his profile during the campaign; he regurgitated another story, too, when he tells Logan about the awkward conversation with his father when he asked him to teach him about politics—a tale he’d previously woven for the CBC’s Peter Mansbridge.

3. Trudeau nearly flunked out of school—and sees that near-dropout as a leading example of his failure.

The show’s most revealing clip may have come in an online bonus extra. In a “60 Minutes Overtime” video online, Logan asks Trudeau whether he’s ever “tasted failure.” He pauses, then says he nearly dropped out of Grade 12, feeling the pressure of following in his father’s high-achieving footsteps. “I went through a real period of wondering whether or not I was a worthy son, or even a worthy individual,” he said. “It repeated a few times at moments throughout my life where I was faced with uncertainty about whether or not I was actually on the right track, or actually even a good and worthy person. And quite frankly, through public life, the connection I’ve managed to establish with people in actually making a difference and helping and learning has done a really good job of having me understand that maybe I am a good person with things to offer and meaningful contributions to make.”

4. Trudeau took another swipe at Donald Trump.

Logan asked Trudeau whether or not he was concerned about whether refugees represent potential terrorism threats. In his response, Trudeau couldn’t help but take an unsubtle swing at the Republican Party’s frontrunner: “Ultimately, being open and respectful toward each other is much more powerful as a way to defuse hatred and anger than, you know, layering on, you know, big walls and oppressive policies,” he said. It’s not the first time: When asked to repudiate Trump’s beliefs at Maclean’s Town Hall, he did so, saying, “I stand firmly against the politics of division, the politics of fear.” On 60 Minutes, he also spoke of rebuking the supporter of a particular male presidential candidate for her failure to care about the global picture. These are rather daring interventions into a heated U.S. political race, and there are those who believe it’s best for Trudeau to stay out of it, to see how things shake out.

5. A glossing-over of some real issues.

Sure, there are only so many things you can do and say in 13 minutes. But it is odd to hear Logan describe the arrival of 25,000 Syrian refugees—which came months after the campaign-promised deadline—as achieved in an easy fait accompli. It is difficult to agree entirely with the claim that Pierre Trudeau “famously made Canada one of the most progressive countries in the world” when he suspended civil liberties by invoking the War Measures Act during the October Crisis. It’s odd to hear Logan suggest, largely unbidden, that the withdrawal of jets from the fight against ISIS represents a “deeper engagement in the war.” And it’s unusual to hear that Canada is more than hockey and cold fronts when Trudeau is not, it seemed, asked about his agenda for his important visit with Barack Obama.

But then again, Trudeau wouldn’t need to do these get-to-know-you interviews if Americans were already up to speed on Canadian politics. The segments weren’t for us, at home. And even if these profiles have proven to focus more on the telegenic leader than the country itself, it is impossible to argue that it’s not a useful exercise to try to raise Canada’s profile. He is asking America to—in the words of his father—just watch him. And so, we will: The real test starts this week, in Washington.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/five-takeaways-from-justin-trudeaus-60-minutes-segment/feed/0An exposé of the indentured servitude in the NCAAhttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/an-expose-of-the-indentured-servitude-at-play-in-the-ncaa/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/an-expose-of-the-indentured-servitude-at-play-in-the-ncaa/#respondSun, 21 Feb 2016 12:41:25 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=836005'Indentured' is a meticulous yet blistering book about the NCAA and its draconian laws and tactics. But can it move the needle?

The NCAA—the governing body of college sports—is built on lies. That’s the convincing argument made in this meticulous yet blistering book by New York Times columnist Nocera (with Ben Strauss) about the cartel-like organization that’s so desperate to not compensate its revenue-generating athletes—the usually black basketball and football players often hailing from poor families—that it’s willing to go to great lengths to protect its way of life. “How can the NCAA act so ruthlessly to enforce rules that are so petty?” Nocera asks. His book is a prosecution of an organization that’s willing to deploy semantic tricks and draconian tactics against students, parents and schools—and, worst of all, seems to go out of its way to avoid simply doing the humane thing.

Indentured tracks the decline of the dream of truly amateur sports, beginning with the creation of the term “student-athlete,” that court-supported confection that forms the core of the NCAA’s justification of not paying its athletes—the league’s original sin. The phrase, created by its first executive director, Walter Byers, affirmed the NCAA’s founding notion that anything commercial was the devil, and that these students—gifted a scholarship for a good education and the ability to play for the love of the game, NCAA proponents claim—must be protected from capitalism’s claws.

Never mind the NCAA’s own Faustian bargains, which allow the association to rake in nearly $1 billion U.S. annually through rich TV-rights pacts, corporate sponsorships and jersey sales—yes, the NCAA literally sells their athletes’ names from the shirts on their back, with the players not receiving a cent. Athletic programs require so much practice and travel time that playing is effectively full-time work. Schools are diluting their educational offerings with fake courses to give their athletes passing grades, while siphoning money away from academic programs and into athletics departments, seen as the manicured “front porch” of the school. How, then, can these athletes not be employees? And why can’t they get in on the riches they’re generating, through massive events like March Madness and the Rose Bowl?

The “student” portion of student-athlete, it turns out, is only really good for as long as the “athlete” part is useful to the program. Academic careers are held in the balance on the basis of depth charts. The NCAA’s own investigators are often the judge, jury and executioner of a student-athlete’s future.

It’s not like there isn’t money to spare, either: look no further for proof of economic runoff than the salaries being showered upon college coaches, whose salaries have skyrocketed in recent years. In 2014, the 25 highest-paid football coaches at public American universities made an average of $3.85 million a year, making many of them better paid than the governor of their states.

The individual cases scattered throughout the book are galling. But it’s the unlikely team of reformers—the NCAA’s first leader Byers, looking to atone for his sins; sneaker salesman Sonny Vaccaro, the book’s loquacious star; the athletes-turned-organizers who tried to unionize Northwestern University’s football team; and a group of passionate, canny economists—that give the book its life. Together, they help bring a major class-action suit—O’Bannon v. NCAA—that found that the league was violating antitrust laws in 2013. It was a victory, albeit a pyrrhic one; the NCAA continues to appeal that ruling, and has won on some counts.

At one point, a leader of the United Steelworkers—who helped the Northwestern’s team with its union effort—tells Nocera he thought exposing the NCAA’s outrages would be a quick “lift-up-the-rock” affair, that revelations would shock fans into revolution. The reality is this was a Sisyphus-like effort. With this documentation of the slow collapse of the NCAA’s defenses, Nocera and Strauss have surely heaved the rock up the hill—but it’s hard to believe it has crested over.

After all, just look at the provocative title of this book. It isn’t the first time there’s been a prominent comparison to indentured servitude—it’s at least the fourth, from founding father Byers to a damning feature in The Atlantic. And if the shadow of slavery isn’t enough to generate revulsion for a league fuelled by hypocrisy, what will?

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/an-expose-of-the-indentured-servitude-at-play-in-the-ncaa/feed/0Grammys 2016: One step forward, three steps backhttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/arts/grammys-2016-one-step-forward-three-steps-back/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/arts/grammys-2016-one-step-forward-three-steps-back/#commentsTue, 16 Feb 2016 08:40:45 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=834579Kendrick Lamar won the battle, but didn't win the war. Music's big night rejected hip-hop once more, and marked it as an outsider again

“Welcome to the 2016 Grammys,” cried out Taylor Swift, launching music’s big night with a performance of “Out of the Woods.” “But right now, it’s 1989!”

That declaration, which opened the 58th annual Grammy Awards on Monday night, felt strange; her album 1989, named after the year she was born, was released nearly two full years ago, an oddity of the Grammys’ unusual eligibility period. (She was even nominated in three categories last year, too, because the single “Shake It Off” managed to be released in time.) But her words that this was a different calendar year would prove to be an odious portent for an awards night that hinted at reform and renewal, and instead applied another layer of protective lacquer onto its status quo.

1989, after all, was the year that the Grammys first decided to acknowledge rap music existed, creating a category for Best Rap Performance a full decade after hip-hop’s first appearance on wax with “Rapper’s Delight.” That year, prominent rappers—including DJ Jazzy Jeff and Will “the Fresh Prince” Smith, who went on to win with their appropriately titled “Parents Just Don’t Understand”—boycotted the ceremony because the award presentation wouldn’t be televised.

Twenty-seven years later, here were the Grammys still, revelling in all its contradictions. On the same night that the Academy president made a condescending speech about the value of art, essentially slamming its streaming-services lifeline in the process—before, morbidly, playing a video reel honouring musicians who passed away, a horribly mawkish warning about the death of music—it awarded Album of the Year to a two-year-old album, the greatest strength of which was its obscene unit-selling populism. And on the same night where rapper-turned-regular-Grammy-host LL Cool J went to great lengths to pay tribute to hip-hop icons—”With all that divides us today, our shared love of music unites us,” he said—the Academy shut the gates once again, allowing Kendrick Lamar to give the evening’s most indelible performance, and to take home a night-leading five Grammys out of his 11 nominations, but none in the prestige categories. He won the battle, but not the war.

This was not going to be hip-hop’s Grammy moment. It’s a very familiar feeling.

Despite its dominance in our popular culture, from music and beyond, the Washington Postfound that of the 81 winners of the prestige general categories—song, album and record of the year—since 1989, just 1.2 per cent of the winners were hip-hop. (I would disagree with the assessment that the 1999 album of the year The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill isn’t hip-hop, but that would just bump the number up to 2.5 per cent, which really just proves the point.) And 8.1 per cent of the nominations were hip-hop songs.

Lamar did his part. He proved that he’s one of music’s most essential figures, giving a searing, man-possessed performance of “Alright” and “The Blacker the Berry” while hauling America’s original sin of slavery to the cultural forefront, and naming the date of Trayvon Martin’s death as the day “I lost my life, too.” And five Grammys is surely nothing to sniff at.

But the truly big achievement—a win in the Best Album or Best Record categories in which he was nominated—wasn’t meant to be. It should have been obvious when Lamar’s Black Lives Matter anthem “Alright” lost song of the year to Ed Sheeran and his Grammy-bait ballad “Thinking Out Loud.”

It’s hard to reconcile the fact that the same Academy who gave 2015’s album of the year to Beck, whose Morning Phase was championed over Beyoncé’s self-titled album on the basis of “artistic merit,” would brazenly go and recognize Taylor Swift this year, for an album was pop in its true form. It’s what makes To Pimp A Butterfly‘s loss all the more painful—it is a perfect-storm album that went platinum, is a critical darling, and is a force for social change, made by an artist who took the awards seriously. He played by the rules. He had an ideal album for the Academy’s riven camps. Seeing the album lose makes it hard to imagine what rap record could take this category ever again.

At the very least, it won Best Rap Album, allowing Lamar to honour slighted rap albums from the past. “This is for hip-hop. This for Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle, this for Illmatic, this for Nas,” he said, before ending on this earnest note: “We will live forever, believe that.”

Meanwhile, Taylor Swift’s victory speech feted the breaking of a somewhat niche kind of glass ceiling—she exulted that she was the first female solo act to win Album of the Year twice, but then again, only three male solo acts have won it twice, and four women have at least two Album of the Year credits to their name—while a black rapper heralding a vital social message was snubbed. Last year, Beyoncé was assailed for not being a “true artist” because she didn’t write her own songs; this year, Swift brought her committee of producers onto the stage and outed her main sonic collaborator, Max Martin. There will likely be little questioning of her artistic bona fides anyway.

Taylor Swift, second from right, accepts the award for album of the year for “1989” at the 58th annual Grammy Awards on Monday, Feb. 15, 2016, in Los Angeles. (Photo by Matt Sayles/Invision/AP)

Something feels infuriating and revealing about Swift’s win and Lamar’s loss: It highlighted what it means to be an insider. “When it comes down to actual voting, it’s not just about the music,” a Grammy voter told Billboard. “Taylor stands up for causes that matter to artists and songwriters—and an important part of the Grammys is advocacy. When you show up at events to support what the Recording Academy does, that goes a long way with voters.” The fact that her bestselling album helped buoy the hard-luck industry, and her stand against that grim streaming spectre when she rejected Apple Music, were not forgotten. It’s a strong album, to be certain, but 1989‘s win at least feels like a reward from insiders—and was a vision of who the Academy sees as outsiders.

It begs us to ask what the point of these awards show even are. Only eight awards were actually presented in Monday’s tedious televised affair. At their core, they are fun, frivolous exercises in industry-insider congratulation. That does, of course, have a place—even a necessary one. But as it becomes clearer to media and the masses that art, and its consumption, is fundamentally an act of representation, it’s not enough to just self-congratulate. Instead, when you consistently leave out groups of people and entire genres out of the night’s top honours, that back-slapping reads as a gleeful maintenance of the status quo—as it should, because it’s exactly what it is.

That makes it hard to watch an awards show that, as its various presenters repeatedly urged, celebrated music and its magical moments. The Grammys become a frustrating night presenting a fantastical fiction, of an industry operating in a place immune to both fan voices and the free marketplace, where pop somehow isn’t populist, where you’re rewarded for doing what you’re supposed to do, lobbying the right people, and staying in your lane. It’s an award show where its president will acknowledge that popular music is rooted in black culture, but based on its awards, won’t allow that black music is culturally important. If art is representation, art awards are quickly becoming judges of who gets to play and who doesn’t—and, most infuriatingly, doing so amid pomp and revelry.

It was Nina Simone, after all, who said that it is an artist’s duty to reflect the times. The Grammys talk a big game about that duty, too. And yet they will exclude the man who spent Monday night proving just how deeply he reflected them, and instead reward the person whose two-year-old album celebrates the halcyon 1980s. More than it has in the last few years, it felt out of touch because it got so tantalizingly close. So maybe it’s time to stop hoping for an awakening. Maybe it’s too infuriating to see these awards rub its contradictions in our faces. Maybe it’s time to just give up on the Grammys.

As crowds filed out of the Staples Center, shameless yawper Pitbull sang a remix of famed dancehall jam “Murder She Wrote” surrounded by women dressed like taxis before teaming up with professional sleazebag Robin Thicke, who has abandoned his absolution shtick, and tattooed rubboard Travis Barker. It was all a little bit Mad Max, like it was the first musical performance after doomsday. No one asked for this. And in that way, this performance felt apt.

]]>http://www.macleans.ca/culture/arts/grammys-2016-one-step-forward-three-steps-back/feed/11The artists to watch at the 2016 Grammy Awardshttp://www.macleans.ca/culture/arts/the-artists-to-watch-at-the-2016-grammy-awards/
http://www.macleans.ca/culture/arts/the-artists-to-watch-at-the-2016-grammy-awards/#respondTue, 09 Feb 2016 12:16:20 +0000http://www.macleans.ca/?p=830985They may or may not take home the hardware. But these Grammy-nominated artists have the best storylines going into the Feb. 15 show.

]]>As controversy continues to brew over the Oscars’ whiteness, the Grammys march ever forward. That’s not to say that there are no conflicts on music’s big night—usually the issue being outdated choices or confusing genre categories. The Grammys have typically taken the latter part of “awards show” more seriously than the former, and this year’s show features some—let’s say—interesting storylines. Here are some of the artists to watch for, even if (and in some cases especially if) they won’t necessarily enjoy a big awards night:

Kendrick Lamar. (MARKETWIRED PHOTO/Free The Children)

Kendrick Lamar

Lamar is destined to be the big storyline of the evening, either by winning all or most of his Grammy-leading 11 nominations, or by being shut out of the major categories, thereby becoming the most galling proof that the Grammys are committed to ignoring rap music made by black people. While the nods for Lamar’s complicated To Pimp A Butterfly are a clear step in the right direction—it does, after all, both have markers of commercial and critical success—this year’s Grammy nominees still show an absence of black rap/R&B stars in general genres; most notably, Fetty Wap was not among the potential best new artists. So will it be a night of redress, for ignoring Lamar’s incredible good kid, m.a.a.d. city, or a night of regress? Closer to the former, I’d bet: look for Lamar to take the marquee album of the year, along with another three wins.

Courtney Barnett

Four of the five artists in the Best New Artist hew closely to the format of the last three years: artists who already enjoy commercial success in their respective genres, especially frontrunner Meghan Trainor. The standout: unapologetically Aussie rocker Courtney Barnett, who has the “Esperanza Spalding” position all to herself as the clear unknown. That’s actually an advantage for an award that may be the most subjective of them all: It goes to a “new artist who releases, during the eligibility year, the first recording that establishes the public identity of that artist.” In a pretty middling field, being a total unknown could help Barnett out.

Alabama Shakes

Grammy voters generally fall into three camps jostling for the centre: those who wish to celebrate commercial success, those who wish to give primacy to artistic merit, and those who seek to define what music should be and should do. Beck, who surprised many by winning the Album of the Year award last year, was the darling of the latter group, and so too are Alabama Shakes, a hard-working road-warrior band that offers a kind of “artisanal” rock and roll, dappled in Americana and bluesy soul. It’s unlikely the Beck effect will strike again—where voters, split between Beyoncé and Sam Smith, seem to have gone for the compromise choice—but if they do, the Shakes are well-qualified for that slot.

Hilariously different artists competing against each other

Okay, this isn’t an artist to watch, but there are few things more entertaining at the Grammys Another than watching the awards for categories that pit artists against each other who have nothing musical in common. In the ever-more confusing Best Rock Album category, metal rockers Slipknot are gearing up to face the hushed tones of Death Cab for Cutie, which hops out of its standard Best Alternative Music Album home. And we wish we had a time machine so we could ask 1960s-era Bob Dylan whether he could ever imagine being nominated for a Grammy in the same category (Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album) as the schmaltzy Tony Bennett and Barry Manilow, and suburban-mom magnet Josh Groban.

Taylor Swift performs onstage during the 1989 World Tour Live on October 17, 2015 at the AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas. (Cooper Neill/Getty Images)

Taylor Swift

The 2016 Grammys were supposed to be Swift’s celebratory valediction, for her curated-Instagram-profile-on-wax 1989. She’s even been actively wooing Grammy voters, participating in Recording Academy events; the fact that her album helped buoy the industry will help her come awards season. And she does have seven nominations to her name. But the landscape has changed in the nearly two years since 1989 came out—an effect of the overlong eligibility period—and Adele’s seismic commercial impact has diminished the impressiveness of Swift’s sales accomplishments. Odds are she will win Record of the Year, but she may be the artist to finally make us feel that the Grammys need to fix the eligibility process so the awards celebrate artists in a timelier way.

Little Big Town

“Girl Crush” is not a gay-rights anthem. It is, explains the four-piece Little Big Town—nominated for both Best Country Duo/Group Performance and Best Country Album largely on the strength of the song—a sneaky little tune that’s mostly about jealousy. But a mini-tempest emerged when there were reports—since discovered to be largely fabricated—that country radio stations were taking the track down because Southern listeners didn’t care for a song celebrating the “gay agenda.” That sniff of reform in country music’s conservative mores could be enough to fool progressive Grammy voters—it was part of Kacey Musgraves’s appeal when she won Country Album of the Year in 2014—but Little Big Town’s Bonnie Tyler-borrowing track is, beyond the faux controversy, just a pretty ballad.

Galantis

The Best Dance Recording category will have two primary bellwethers: The award will either go to Justin Bieber/Skrillex’s crossover sensation “What Do U Mean,” or will presage a big Kendrick Lamar night if “Never Catch Me”—his collaboration with Flying Lotus that sticks out like a gorgeous thumb among a mess of pop-electronica—gets the win. Nor would it be shocking if Chemical Brothers and Q-Tip nab it again, since their last collaboration, “Galvanize,” was Grammy gold. But while fans had hoped that Daft Punk’s big year in 2014 meant that dance could break into the general categories, artists like DJ Snake failed to make it into the Best New Artist category, and things remain muddy even in own home-base categories. If the Academy wants to silence critics that the Grammys don’t quite understand the genre, Galantis’s “Runaway (U&I)”, a festival circuit-breaker with its true EDM builds, juicy sing-out-loud hooks and sunny brightness, may represent the clearest way forward.

Chris Stapleton

The Grammys don’t typically give a ton of love to traditional country acts in the best album category—Swift’s Fearless was the last one to be nominated, when it won in 2010. But Stapleton’s unprocessed, throwback sound makes him a standout in a genre that is wrestling with its direction—with Best New Artist candidate Sam Hunt, sounding like a baleful, twangy Drake, serving as the herald of a genre more willing than ever to sell its soul. Stapleton is part of the “outlaw” contingent that’s bringing country back to its Nashville roots, as my Maclean’s colleague Charlie Gillis writes—and while he’s very unlikely to win, his nomination is a logical reflection of the Grammy traditionalists who feted Kacey Musgraves over Swift’s pop incursion Red two years ago in the country category. They’re clearly pleased to see a return to this nostalgic sound.

Drake

Speaking of Toronto’s Six God, he doesn’t appear much among the nominees—it was revealed that his biggest hit, “Hotline Bling,” wasn’t submitted because of a clerical error by his label, and he rebuked a Super Bowl ad that suggested he would be performing at the show. But his greatest success is, without a doubt, getting nominated for his Meek Mill diss track Back to Back:a song that vowed to crush his rival—who claimed Drake used a ghostwriter—by sheer capitalism, populism and acclaim, and has managed to do just that. “This for y’all that think that I don’t write enough/They just mad cause I got the Midas touch,” he boasted. A Grammy nom is convincing proof.

Patti Smith

A four-decades-long career. Eleven albums. But Patti Smith, Rock and Roll Hall of Famer and the “punk poet laureate,” has never won a Grammy despite being nominated three times. But she’s nominated again this year, though not for her singing or songwriting—she’s in the Best Spoken Word Album category for her reading of Jo Nesbo’s novel Blood on Snow, facing sentimental heavyweight in former president Jimmy Carter, who just last month said he had beaten cancer, and strong contender Amy Poehler, both for audiobooks of their memoirs. (Talk about oddball competitors.) If Smith wins, it would be the strangest possible make-up call for failing to recognize her important punk-rock work in her ’70s heyday.

Kehlani

The Oakland R&B songbird is just one of the five equally vital voices up for Best Urban Contemporary Album. But she’s the only one who’s a 20-year-old who was homeless just three years ago, and released her now Grammy-nominated mixtape, You Should Be Here, for free on Soundcloud. It was one of my favourite albums last year, standing out with her ability to tell inspirational personal stories in a way that didn’t feel schlocky, and revitalizing traditional R&B—with its focus on intimate relationships and slinky vocals—in a unique way.

Pentatonix

“I think you guys are sent back from the future to save a cappella and do it in a futuristic way,” said Boyz II Men’s Shawn Stockman back in 2011 when the five-person group were but contestants on NBC’s The Sing-Off. Heady stuff. And the ambitious group have said it themselves—they want to redeem a capella. And there’s no doubt that’s exactly what they’ve done, buoyed by an enormous social-media following. They won this category last year, and if they win again, for their impossibly tight arrangement of “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies,” they’ll establish themselves as the unquestioned top dogs, now and for the foreseeable future.

Nicki Minaj

Can she do any wrong? After a year where she lashed out at Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus and the New York Times and won, she’s making more history at this year’s Grammys—among her three nominations for tracks off her album The Pinkprint, she’s earned what is surely the first Grammy nomination for a song named after a very gross sexual effluent.

The Grammy Awards take place on Monday, Feb. 15, at 8 pm ET, in Los Angeles’ Staples Center, broadcast live on CITY.